Impacts of reservoir boundaries and fracture dimensions on pressure behaviors and flow regimes of hydraulically fractured formations

Abstract

Hydraulic fracturing process is an important stimulation technique that has been widely used in conventional and unconventional oil and gas reservoirs. The technique involves creation of fracture or fracture system in porous medium to overcome wellbore damage, to improve oil and gas productivity in low-permeability reservoirs or to increase production in secondary recovery operations. This paper introduces a new technique for interpreting pressures behavior of a horizontal well with multiple hydraulic fractures. The well extends in multi-boundary reservoirs having different configurations. The hydraulic fractures in this model can be longitudinal or transverse, vertical or inclined, symmetrical or asymmetrical. The fractures are propagated in isotropic or anisotropic formations and considered having different dimensions and different spacing. The study has shown that pressure responses and flow regimes are significantly influenced by both reservoir’s boundaries and fractures’ dimensions. Different flow regimes have been observed for different conditions. New flow regimes have been introduced in this study. The first one is the early radial flow regime which represents the radial flow around each fracture in the vertical plane resulted due to the partial vertical penetration of hydraulic fractures. The second one is the second linear flow regime which represents the linear flow toward each fractures in the vertical plane normal to the wellbore resulted due to the long spacing between fractures. The third one is the third linear flow regime which represents the linear flow in the vertical plane parallel to the wellbore after the pressure pulse reaches the upper and lower impermeable boundaries.