Interpretation of stress damage on fracture conductivity

Abstract

This paper focuses on the investigation of pressure responses in a well producing through a composite system of a stress-sensitive vertical symmetric or asymmetric fracture interacting with a stress-sensitive permeable-porous medium. Results of this investigation demonstrate that when the fracture conductivity is stress dependent, the use of conventional techniques to evaluate fractured wells may lead to incorrect estimates of the fracture-formation properties. For finite conductivity fractures, the stress effects in the formation have a negligible influence on the absolute value of the slope that defines the pseudo-bilinear flow regime. During this flow regime only the pressure sensitivity in the fracture and the fracture conductivity govern this flow period. For cases that involve highly conductive fractures, it was found that the slope of 0.5 which defines the linear flow regime is not influenced by the stress effect of the fracture and formation. However, stress in highly conductive fractures has a measureable influence in the change of conductivity. The occurrence of the stress damage in finite and infinite conductivity fractures is due to the partial closure fracture or partial choke fracture effect and can be anticipated in terms of pressure or time level by using the equations provided in this work. The results derived from this research have a major impact in improving the analysis of fractured wells pressure responses, as well as in forecasting of fracture closure occurrence and in programming stimualtion operations in fractured wells. An example with synthetic data is presented to illustrate these new findings.