Long-Term Performance of Hydraulically Fractured Layered Rich Gas Condensate Reservoir

Abstract

Compositional simulator has been used to investigate the effect of hydraulic fracture on the performance of a layered rich gas condensate reservoir in Saudi Arabia. The reservoir consists of five layers having permeabilities ranging from 0.08 to 115 md with about 68% of the gas reserve located in the lowest permeability layer. The fracture is assumed to penetrate all layers. The results of this investigation showed that hydraulic fracturing of such a reservoir is effective in improving the productivity of the gas condensate wells. The productivity index (PI) of the cases investigated was found to increase by as much as 3.6 folds. Hydraulic fractures were also found to delay the onset of the dew point pressure and consequently extend the production plateau above the dew point pressure. The production plateau above the dew point pressure was found to increase with increasing the dimensionless fracture conductivity. The results of this study also showed that once the dew point pressure is reached, the flowing bottom hole pressure was found to drop sharply to the specified minimum flowing bottom hole pressure in the fractured and nonfractured cases. However, the drop is less severe in the fractured case. This sharp drop in the flowing bottom hole pressure results in dropping the productivity of the gas condensate wells. Condensate build up along the fracture faces was found to be more significant in the high permeability layers. At early times after reaching the dew point pressure, the highest condensate saturation was found to be in the highest permeability layer. However, at late times (after reaching pseudo steady state) it decreased to a certain level above the critical condensate saturation. Finally, formation cross-flow is found to improve the productivity of the fractured and the nonfractured gas condensate wells. However, the improvement is more pronounced in the fractured cases.