Author: Jiahang Han
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Tight gas reservoirs are low-permeability (

Author: Nick Bahrami
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3319024817
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
Tight gas reservoirs have very low permeability and porosity, which cannot be produced at economical flow rates unless the well is efficiently stimulated and completed using advanced and optimized technologies. Economical production on the basis of tight gas reservoirs is challenging in general, not only due to their very low permeability but also to several different forms of formation damage that can occur during drilling, completion, stimulation, and production operations. This study demonstrates in detail the effects of different well and reservoir static and dynamic parameters that influence damage mechanisms and well productivity in tight gas reservoirs. Geomechanics, petrophysics, production and reservoir engineering expertise for reservoir characterization is combined with a reservoir simulation approach and core analysis experiments to understand the optimum strategy for tight gas development, delivering improved well productivity and gas recovery.

Author: Juan Correa Castro
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Unconventional gas has become an important resource to help meet our future energy demands. Although plentiful, it is difficult to produce this resource, when locked in a massive sedimentary formation. Among all unconventional gas resources, tight gas sands represent a big fraction and are often characterized by very low porosity and permeability associated with their producing formations, resulting in extremely low production rate. The low flow properties and the recovery factors of these sands make necessary continuous efforts to reduce costs and improve efficiency in all aspects of drilling, completion and production techniques. Many of the recent improvements have been in well completions and hydraulic fracturing. Thus, the main goal of a hydraulic fracture is to create a long, highly conductive fracture to facilitate the gas flow from the reservoir to the wellbore to obtain commercial production rates. Fracture conductivity depends on several factors, such as like the damage created by the gel during the treatment and the gel clean-up after the treatment. This research is focused on predicting more accurately the fracture conductivity, the gel damage created in fractures, and the fracture cleanup after a hydraulic fracture treatment under certain pressure and temperature conditions. Parameters that alter fracture conductivity, such as polymer concentration, breaker concentration and gas flow rate, are also examined in this study. A series of experiments, using a procedure of "dynamical fracture conductivity test," were carried out. This procedure simulates the proppant/frac fluid slurries flow into the fractures in a low-permeability rock, as it occurs in the field, using different combinations of polymer and breaker concentrations under reservoirs conditions. The result of this study provides the basis to optimize the fracturing fluids and the polymer loading at different reservoir conditions, which may result in a clean and conductive fracture. Success in improving this process will help to decrease capital expenditures and increase the production in unconventional tight gas reservoirs.

Author: T.D. van Golf-Racht
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080868665
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 729

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Book Description
In the modem language of reservoir engineering by reservoir description is understood the totality of basic local information concerning the reservoir rock and fluids which by various procedures are extrapolated over the entire reservoir. Fracture detection, evaluation and processing is another essential step in the process of fractured reservoir description. In chapter 2, all parameters related to fracture density and fracture intensity, together with various procedures of data processing are discussed in detail. After a number of field examples, developed in Chap. 3, the main objective remains the quantitative evaluation of physical properties. This is done in Chap. 4, where the evaluation of fractures porosity and permeability, their correlation and the equivalent ideal geometrical models versus those parameters are discussed in great detail. Special rock properties such as capillary pressure and relative permeability are reexamined in the light of a double-porosity reservoir rock. In order to complete the results obtained by direct measurements on rock samples, Chap. 5 examines fracturing through indirect measurements from various logging results. The entire material contained in these five chapters defines the basic physical parameters and indicates procedures for their evaluation which may be used further in the description of fractured reservoirs.

Author: John Peter Vermylen
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
This thesis presents five studies of a gas shale reservoir using diverse methodologies to investigate geomechanical and transport properties that are important across the full reservoir lifecycle. Using the Barnett shale as a case study, we investigated adsorption, permeability, geomechanics, microseismicity, and stress evolution in two different study areas. The main goals of this thesis can be divided into two parts: first, to investigate how flow properties evolve with changes in stress and gas species, and second, to understand how the interactions between stress, fractures, and microseismicity control the creation of a permeable reservoir volume during hydraulic fracturing. In Chapter 2, we present results from adsorption and permeability experiments conducted on Barnett shale rock samples. We found Langmuir-type adsorption of CH4 and N2 at magnitudes consistent with previous studies of the Barnett shale. Three of our samples demonstrated BET-type adsorption of CO2, in contrast to all previous studies on CO2 adsorption in gas shales, which found Langmuir-adsorption. At low pressures (600 psi), we found preferential adsorption of CO2 over CH4 ranging from 3.6x to 5.5x. While our measurements were conducted at low pressures (up to 1500 psi), when our model fits are extrapolated to reservoir pressures they reach similar adsorption magnitudes as have been found in previous studies. At these high reservoir pressures, the very large preferential adsorption of CO2 over CH4 (up to 5-10x) suggests a significant potential for CO2 storage in gas shales like the Barnett if practical problems of injectivity and matrix transport can be overcome. We successfully measured permeability versus effective stress on two intact Barnett shale samples. We measured permeability effective stress coefficients less than 1 on both samples, invalidating our hypothesis that there might be throughgoing flow paths within the soft, porous organic kerogen that would lead the permeability effective stress coefficient to be greater than 1. The results suggest that microcracks are likely the dominant flow paths at these scales. In Chapter 3, we present integrated geological, geophysical, and geomechanical data in order to characterize the rock properties in our Barnett shale study area and to model the stress state in the reservoir before hydraulic fracturing occurred. Five parallel, horizontal wells were drilled in the study area and then fractured using three different techniques. We used the well logs from a vertical pilot well and a horizontal well to constrain the stress state in the reservoir. While there was some variation along the length of the well, we were able to determine a best fit stress state of Pp = 0.48 psi/ft, Sv = 1.1 psi/ft, SHmax = 0.73 psi/ft, and Shmin = 0.68 psi/ft. Applying this stress state to the mapped natural fractures indicates that there is significant potential for induced shear slip on natural fracture planes in this region of the Barnett, particularly close to the main hydraulic fracture where the pore pressure increase during hydraulic fracturing is likely to be very high. In Chapter 4, we present new techniques to quantify the robustness of hydraulic fracturing in gas shale reservoirs. The case study we analyzed involves five parallel horizontal wells in the Barnett shale with 51 frac stages. To investigate the numbers, sizes, and types of microearthquakes initiated during each frac stage, we created Gutenberg-Richter-type magnitude distribution plots to see if the size of events follows the characteristic scaling relationship found in natural earthquakes. We found that slickwater fracturing does generate a log-linear distribution of microearthquakes, but that it creates proportionally more small events than natural earthquake sources. Finding considerable variability in the generation of microearthquakes, we used the magnitude analysis as a proxy for the "robustness" of the stimulation of a given stage. We found that the conventionally fractured well and the two alternately fractured wells ("zipperfracs") were more effective than the simultaneously fractured wells ("simulfracs") in generating microearthquakes. We also found that the later stages of fracturing a given well were more successful in generating microearthquakes than the early stages. In Chapter 5, we present estimates of stress evolution in our study reservoir through analysis of the instantaneous shut-in pressure (ISIP) at the end of each stage. The ISIP increased stage by stage for all wells, but the simulfrac wells showed the greatest increase and the zipperfrac wells the least. We modeled the stress increase in the reservoir with a simple sequence of 2-D cracks along the length of the well. When using a spacing of one crack per stage, the modeled stress increase was nearly identical to the measured stress increase in the zipperfrac wells. When using three cracks per stage, the modeled final stage stress magnitude matched the measured final stage stress magnitude from the simulfrac wells, but the rate of stress increase in the simulfrac wells was much more gradual than the model predicted. To further investigate the causes of these ISIP trends, we began numerical flow and stress analysis to more realistically model the processes in the reservoir. One of our hypotheses was that the shorter total time needed to complete all the stages of the simulfrac wells was the cause of the greater ISIP increase compared to the zipperfrac wells. The microseismic activity level measured in Chapter 4 also correlates with total length of injection, suggesting leak off into the reservoir encouraged shear failure. Numerical modeling using the coupled FEM and flow software GEOSIM was able to model some cumulative stress increase the reservoir, but the full trend was not replicated. Further work to model field observations of hydraulic fracturing will enhance our understanding of the impact that hydraulic fracturing and stress change have on fracture creation and permeability enhancement in gas shales.

Author: Abdul Muqtadir Khan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The vast shale gas and tight oil reservoirs in North America cannot be economically developed without multi-stage hydraulic fracture treatments. Owing to the disparity in the density of natural fractures in addition to the disparate in-situ stress conditions in these kinds of formations, microseismic fracture mapping has shown that hydraulic fracture treatments develop a range of large-scale fracture networks in the shale plays. In this thesis, an approach is presented, where the fracture networks approximated with microseismic mapping are integrated with a commercial numerical production simulator that discretely models the network structure in both vertical and horizontal wells. A novel approach for reservoir simulation is used, where porosity (instead of permeability) is used as a scaling parameter for the fracture width. Two different fracture geometries have been broadly proposed for a multi stage horizontal well, orthogonal and transverse. The orthogonal pattern represents a complex network with cross cutting fractures orthogonal to each other; whereas transverse pattern maps uninterrupted fractures achieving maximum depth of penetration into the reservoir. The response for a single-stage fracture is further investigated by comparing the propagation of the stage to be dendritic versus planar. A dendritic propagation is bifurcation of the hydraulic fracture due to intersection with the natural fracture (failure along the plane of weakness). The impact of fracture spacing to optimize these fracture geometries is studied. A systematic optimization for designing the fracture length and width is also presented. The simulation is motivated by the oil window of Eagle Ford shale formation and the results of this work illustrate how different fracture network geometries impact well performance, which is critical for improving future horizontal well completions and fracturing strategies in low permeability shale and tight oil reservoirs. A rate transient analysis (RTA) technique employing a rate normalized pressure (RNP) vs. superposition time function (STF) plot is used for the linear flow analysis. The parameters that influence linear flow are analytically derived. It is found that picking a straight line on this curve can lead to erroneous results because multiple solutions exist. A new technique for linear flow analysis is used. The ratio of derivative of inverse production and derivative of square root time is plotted against square root time and the constant derivative region is seen to be indicative of linear flow. The analysis is found to be robust because different simulation cases are modeled and permeability and fracture half-length are estimated.

Author: Atle Thomas Johansen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Oil fields
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description

Author: Mark D. Zoback
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107087074
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 495

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Book Description
A comprehensive overview of the key geologic, geomechanical and engineering principles that govern the development of unconventional oil and gas reservoirs. Covering hydrocarbon-bearing formations, horizontal drilling, reservoir seismology and environmental impacts, this is an invaluable resource for geologists, geophysicists and reservoir engineers.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 70

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Book Description
The US Department of Energy, Federal Energy Technology Center, has sponsored a project to simulate the behavior of tight, fractured, strata-bound gas reservoirs that arise from irregular discontinuous, or clustered networks of fractures. New FORTRAN codes have been developed to generate fracture networks, or simulate reservoir drainage/recharge, and to plot the fracture networks and reservoirs pressures. Ancillary codes assist with raw data analysis.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
The work plan for October 1, 1997 to September 30, 1998 consisted of investigation of a number of topical areas. These topical areas were reported in four quarterly status reports, which were submitted to DOE earlier. These topical areas are reviewed in this volume. The topical areas covered during the year were: (1) Development of preliminary tests of a production method for determining areas of natural fracturing. Advanced Resources has demonstrated that such a relationship exists in the southern Piceance basin tight gas play. Natural fracture clusters are genetically related to stress concentrations (also called stress perturbations) associated with local deformation such a faulting. The mechanical explanation of this phenomenon is that deformation generally initiates at regions where the local stress field is elevated beyond the regional. (2) Regional structural and geologic analysis of the Greater Green River Basin (GGRB). Application of techniques developed and demonstrated during earlier phases of the project for sweet-spot delineation were demonstrated in a relatively new and underexplored play: tight gas from continuous-typeUpper Cretaceous reservoirs of the Greater Green River Basin (GGRB). The effort included data acquisition/processing, base map generation, geophysical and remote sensing analysis and the integration of these data and analyses. (3) Examination of the Table Rock field area in the northern Washakie Basin of the Greater Green River Basin. This effort was performed in support of Union Pacific Resources- and DOE-planned horizontal drilling efforts. The effort comprised acquisition of necessary seismic data and depth-conversion, mapping of major fault geometry, and analysis of displacement vectors, and the development of the natural fracture prediction. (4) Greater Green River Basin Partitioning. Building on fundamental fracture characterization work and prior work performed under this contract, namely structural analysis using satellite and potential field data, the GGRB was divided into partitions that will be used to analyze the resource potential of the Frontier and Mesaverde Upper Cretaceous tight gas play. A total of 20 partitions were developed, which will be instrumental for examining the Upper Cretaceous play potential. (5) Partition Analysis. Resource assessment associated with individual partitions was initiated starting with the Vermilion Sub-basin and the Green River Deep (which include the Stratos well) partitions (see Chapter 5). (6) Technology Transfer. Tech transfer was achieved by documenting our research and presenting it at various conferences.