New, Integrated Approach to Diagnose, Characterize and Locate Inter-Well Fracture Connectivity in Carbonate Reservoirs From Transient-Test Data

Abstract

Characterization of natural fractures in carbonate reservoirs to the resolution of well tests is reliable for major fracture corridors. These fracture corridors, intersecting or non-intersecting the wells, impact the well performance and the ultimate recovery in the field. Good transient-test data is the key to diagnosing fractures and their characteristics. When fractures exist between the wells, it requires some additional efforts in locating these with respect to the wells. To overcome this challenge we propose a new approach of building 3D, numerical models to diagnose and characterize the inter-well fracture corridors. In addition, these 3D multi-well, numerical models are to determine the location and the extent of fracture corridors by utilizing dynamic pressure-transient data. The innovative idea of bringing multiple wells to the models to consider interference of wells and fracture corridors makes the models robust. We have been able to identify the inter-well fracture corridors successfully in carbonate reservoirs by performing pressure-transient analyses on wells. By adjusting the inter-well locations of fracture corridors and the extents of these fracture corridors in the multi-well models, we try to achieve the best possible matches with the transient-pressure data. This integrated approach will provide essential input to 3D full- field reservoir models, and will lead to optimizing field management.

Rapid Identification of Interwell Fracture-Cavity Combination Structure in Fracture-Cavity Reservoir Based on Tracer-Curve Morphological Characteristics

“…Common monitoring data used to identify fractures or cavities, such as seismic, coring, conventional logging, image logging, drilling, and well testing, show large-scale and lowresolution results, or they only show results near a single well (Dittaro et al, 2007;Corbett et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2013;Shbair et al, 2017;Alaa et al, 2018;Wan et al, 2018;Lai et al, 2019;Tian et al, 2019;Wei et al, 2019). Dynamic production data can only be used to analyze interwell connectivity, and it is difficult to identify interwell fracture-cavity composite structures (Gazi et al, 2012;Zhao, 2017;Al-Obathani et al, 2018;Yue et al, 2018b). In recent years, integration of various monitoring data has made an effective way for comprehensive identification and reliable analysis of fracture-cavity characteristics in these reservoirs (Parra and Parra, 2012;Liu et al, 2015;Shekhar et al, 2019).…”