Identification of Fracture Properties in Shale Oil Reservoirs by a Well Testing Model: A Case Study

Abstract

In the shale oil reservoirs, the horizontal wells with large-scale fracturing treatments have been the most effective tools to enhance oil productivity. After large-scale fracturing treatments, many micro-seismic data showed that the fracture networks are generated in the reservoir along the wellbore. Understanding the complex fracture properties is the primary step for fracturing evaluation and productivity estimation. Thus, an efficient approach is needed to estimate the fracture properties. To improve this situation, a well-testing approach was proposed in this work to identify the fracture properties. This work was organized as follows: (1) developing a well-testing model of multiple fracture horizontal well (MFHW) including reservoir flow equations, fracture flow equations, and mass balance equations, (2) solving and verifying the proposed model using boundary element method, superposition principle, and numerical approach, (3) applying the well-testing model to investigate the pressure transient behaviors, and (4) estimating the fracture properties of shale oil wells from the Junggar Basin.

Finite Element Modeling of Diffusion in Fractured Porous Media by Using Hierarchical Material Properties

“…Simulating an approximate two‐dimensional transient response of a hydraulically stimulated wellbore with discrete natural fractures has been performed by other researchers (e.g., Clarkson & Pedersen, 2010; Jun et al., 2020), but is typically too computationally intensive to simulate large domains, the effects of natural fractures, or to include flow in three dimensions. Here, we illustrate the power of the Hi ‐FEM method, which can simultaneously simulate all these effects on a desktop computer.…”