Abstract
At present, investigation of the effects of natural fractures on optimal well spacing of shale gas reservoirs from an economic perspective has been lacking. Traditional frameworks of fracture characterization, such as local grid refinement, make it unfeasible and inaccurate to study these effects of high-density natural fractures with complex geometries on well spacing. In this study, the non-intrusive EDFM (embedded discrete fracture model) method was presented to characterize fractures fast and accurately. The non-intrusiveness of EDFM removed the necessity of accessing the codes behind reservoir simulators, which meant it could simply create associated keywords that would correspondingly modify these fracture properties in separate files without information regarding the source codes. By implementing this powerful technology, a field-scale shale gas reservoir model was set up, including two-phase flow. The effective properties of hydraulic fractures were determined from the history matching process, and the results were entered into the well spacing optimization workflow. Different scenarios of natural fracture (NF) distributions and well spacing were designed, and the final economic analysis for each case was explored based on simulated productions. As a result, one of the findings of this study was that optimal well spacing tended to increase if more natural fractures were presented in the reservoir.
Highlights
Assessment for optimal well spacing is critical to efficiently develop shale gas reservoirs whose economic production has been boosted by the advanced technologies of multiple horizontal wells and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing
These added grid blocks contained the transmissibility information of the NNCs and included important petrophysical properties of the fractures compiled in separated data files, such as fracture porosity, fracture permeability, fracture relative permeability, fracture water saturation, and so on
The nine designed models were fed into the EDFM fracture modeling simulator, and both hydraulic fractures and natural fractures were modeled accurately and efficiently using this method
Summary
Assessment for optimal well spacing is critical to efficiently develop shale gas reservoirs whose economic production has been boosted by the advanced technologies of multiple horizontal wells and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing. The historical deployment of technology to address well spacing optimization in North America in the last decade has been significant. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated that dry shale gas production (715.8 billion cubic meters, or 25.28 trillion cubic feet) accounts for around 75% of total U.S dry natural gas production in. Likewise, according to a statistic shared by Schlumberger [2], 70% of new wells drilled in the US are infills. Current oil and gas low-price market conditions attempt to undermine standard completions strategies and limit the industry’s capability to find techniques that make operations more rigorous and efficient in terms of profitability of the placement of new wells.
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