Study on CO2 foam fracturing model and fracture propagation simulation

Abstract

CO2 foam fracturing fluid has the advantages of water saving and environmental protection, which has been widely used in unconventional oil and gas reservoir. However, there are still many technical difficulties in fracture propagation model and numerical calculation method of CO2 foam fracturing. In this paper, a CO2 foam fracturing fracture propagation model with temperature-pressure-phase coupling is established. Physical parameters of CO2 are calculated by Span-Wagner method, and the finite difference and displacement discontinuity methods are used to solve the model. Moreover, we compare the results of this model with the field measured data, KGD model and EFRAC-3D model to verify the model. The computation results show that in the process of fracturing, improving the CO2 foam quality can significantly enhance the fracturing effect. When the quality increased from 0.5 to 0.8, the fracture width raised by more than 2 times. In addition, the fracture propagation is significantly affected by injection temperature. With the increase of injection temperature, fracture width decreases continuously, and if the CO2 foam is supercritical phase state, it is not conducive to increase the fracture width.