The Implementation of State-of-the-Art Channel Fracturing Technique in High Permeability Layered Reservoirs in the Sinai Peninsula

Abstract

The Abu Rudies field in the Egyptian Sinai peninsula produces mainly from the South Gharib formation that is characterized as a complex, heterogeneous, thick and laminated, but permeable, slightly oil wet rock and depleted sandstones consisting of sands with an average permeability in the range of 150-550 mD and Young's Modulus in the order of 1.0 - 2.5 million psi. Conventional hydraulic fracturing and Frac & Pack techniques have been traditionally deployed to produce hydrocarbons and for sand control. The added complication is the reduction in the effective permeability to oil due to the rock being oil wet. Conventional fracturing techniques have had limited success especially in the highly permeable compartments of the field due to premature screenouts that were encountered extensively, residual polymer in the intergranular porous rock and the flowback of formation sand and proppant. This paper describes the application and production enhancement efforts for the first time with a novel channel-fracturing technique combined with rod-shaped proppant in selected production targets in the Abu Rudies field in Egypt. The channel fracturing technique introduces channels within the proppant pack that significantly increase conductivity and effective fracture half-length leading to increased productivity. Rod-shaped proppant when used as tail-in in fracturing treatments increases near- wellbore fracture conductivity and completely prevents proppant/formation sands flowback as demonstrated by zero flowback due to its particular geometry. This paper describes actual case studies of fracturing a high-permeability layered reservoir using the channel fracturing technique, the problems encountered due to high leak off, low closure pressures, reservoir heterogeneity and the complexity due to adjacent water bearing layers. Finally, we demonstrate the well performance with the channel fracturing technique compared with alternate techniques.