Simulation of the Impact of Fracturing-Fluid-Induced Formation Damage in Shale Gas Reservoirs

Abstract

Summary The unconventional gas resources from tight and shale gas reservoirs have received great attention in the past decade and have become the focus of the petroleum industry. Shale gas reservoirs have specific characteristics, such as tight reservoir rock with nanodarcy permeability. Multistage hydraulic fracturing is required for such low-permeability reservoirs to create very complex fracture networks and therefore to connect effectively a huge reservoir volume to the wellbore. During hydraulic fracturing, an enormous amount of water is injected into the formation, where only 25–60% is reproduced during flowback and a long production period. A major concern with hydraulic fracturing is the water-blocking effect in tight formations caused by the high capillary pressure and the presence of water-sensitive clays. High water saturation in the invaded zone near the fracture face may reduce gas relative permeability greatly and may impede gas production. In this paper, we consider the numerical techniques to simulate during hydraulic fracturing the water invasion or formation damage and its impact on the gas production in shale gas reservoirs. Two-phase-flow simulations are considered in a large stimulated reservoir volume (SRV) containing extremely low-permeability tight matrix and multiscale fracture networks including primary hydraulic fractures, induced secondary fractures, and natural fractures. To simulate the water-blocking phenomenon, it is usually required to explicitly discretize the fracture network and use very fine meshes around the fractures. On the one hand, the commonly used single-porosity model is not suitable for this kind of problem, because a large number of gridblocks is required to simulate the fracture network and fracture–matrix interaction. On the other hand, a dual-porosity (DP) model may also be not applicable, because of the long transient duration with large block sizes of ultralow-permeability matrix. In this paper, we study the applicability of the MINC (multiple interacting continuum) method, and use a hybrid approach between matrix and fractures to correctly simulate the fracturing-fluid invasion and its backflow during hydraulic fracturing. This approach allows us to quantify the fracturing water invasion and its formation-damage effect in the whole SRV.