Relative Productivities and Pressure Transient Modeling of Horizontal Wells with Multiple Fractures

Abstract

Abstract An analytical model has been developed to describe the inflow performance and transient pressure behavior of a horizontal well with multiple hydraulic fractures. The model has been used to compare the relative productivities of multiple fractures, the objective being to determine the conditions under which multiple fractures provide significant improvement over a single fracture. The approach used was to approximate the series of fractures as fully penetrating, uniform flux, vertical fractures in a box-shaped reservoir of closed boundaries. Interference between the multiple fractures was accounted for by the superposition of influence functions. The effect of wellbore storage and skin was incorporated by numerically converting the solution into the Laplace space.