Gas Flow Tightly Coupled to Elastoplastic Geomechanics for Tight and Shale Gas Reservoirs: Material Failure and Enhanced Permeability

Abstract

Abstract We investigate coupled flow and geomechanics in gas production from extremely low permeability reservoirs such as tight and shale gas reservoirs, using coupled dynamically porosity and permeability during simulation. The intrinsic permeability is a step function of the status of material failure, and is updated every time step. We investigate the reservoirs with vertical and horizontal primary fractures, employing the single and double porosity models. We modify the multiple porosity constitutive relations for modeling double porous continua for flow and geomechanics. The numerical results indicate that production of gas causes redistribution of the effective stress fields, increasing the effective shear stress and resulting in plasticity. Shear failure occurs away from the primary fractures as well as near the fracture tips, which indicates generation of secondary fractures. These secondary fractures increase the permeability significantly, and change the flow pattern, which in turn causes a change in distribution of geomechanical variables. When the double porosity flow model is used, we observe a faster evolution of the enhanced permeability area than that obtained from the single porosity model because of the higher permeability of the fractures in the double porosity model. Additionally, we find that the complicated physics for stress sensitive reservoirs cannot properly be captured by uncoupled or decoupled methods, and thus tightly coupled flow and geomechanical models are highly recommended to accurately describe the reservoir behavior during gas production in tight and shale gas reservoirs.