Improving Recovery of Oil and Gas Shale Reservoirs using Hydro-fracturing: Technical and Economical Studies.

Maxime Berthier and Jean-Jacques Royer. ( 2014 )
in: Proc. 34th Gocad Meeting, Nancy

Abstract

During the last decade, drilling technologies (horizontal and multi-branch) and hydraulic fracturing (HF) had improved drastically the recovery of most complex oil and gas shale reservoirs that have reached now similar production rates as conventional ones using HF technology in horizontal wells. This work compares on a case study reservoir conventional primary and secondary recovery technologies to new advanced fracturing technologies. The reservoir is modeled using GOCAD and fractured varying several input parameters. The fracture zones are meshed using a local grid refinement methodology. The reservoir is then exported in ECLIPSE for simulating the expected oil production applying various exploitation scenarios (number of wells, horizontal vs. vertical wells, etc.). The results show that many sensitivity parameters such fractures aperture, length permeability and density, wells pattern optimization and orientation have a severe impact on the recovery factor and must be account for while performing hydraulic fracturing. An economical study is then conducted and has shown that investment projects appear beneficial under certain conditions (enhanced fracture permeability within the range of 50 to 150mD, horizontal wells, fracking coupled with water injection). Under these conditions, the net present value over a 20-year period is highly positive while conventional methods are not. This case study clearly demonstrates the necessity of using EOR technology such as water injection combined with advanced well modeling and hydraulic fracturing to enhance oil production from shale reservoirs. Keywords: Hydraulic fracturing, EOR, oil and gas shale reservoirs, secondary recovery, recovery factor, petroleum economics, GOCAD, Eclipse.

Download / Links

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{BerthierGM2014,
 abstract = { During the last decade, drilling technologies (horizontal and multi-branch) and hydraulic fracturing (HF) had improved drastically the recovery of most complex oil and gas shale reservoirs that have reached now similar production rates as conventional ones using HF technology in horizontal wells. This work compares on a case study reservoir conventional primary and secondary recovery technologies to new advanced fracturing technologies. The reservoir is modeled using GOCAD and fractured varying several input parameters. The fracture zones are meshed using a local grid refinement methodology. The reservoir is then exported in ECLIPSE for simulating the expected oil production applying various exploitation scenarios (number of wells, horizontal vs. vertical wells, etc.).
The results show that many sensitivity parameters such fractures aperture, length permeability and density, wells pattern optimization and orientation have a severe impact on the recovery factor and must be account for while performing hydraulic fracturing. An economical study is then conducted and has shown that investment projects appear beneficial under certain conditions (enhanced fracture permeability within the range of 50 to 150mD, horizontal wells, fracking coupled with water injection). Under these conditions, the net present value over a 20-year period is highly positive while conventional methods are not. This case study clearly demonstrates the necessity of using EOR technology such as water injection combined with advanced well modeling and hydraulic fracturing to enhance oil production from shale reservoirs. Keywords: Hydraulic fracturing, EOR, oil and gas shale reservoirs, secondary recovery, recovery factor, petroleum economics, GOCAD, Eclipse. },
 author = { Berthier, Maxime AND Royer, Jean-Jacques },
 booktitle = { Proc. 34th Gocad Meeting, Nancy },
 title = { Improving Recovery of Oil and Gas Shale Reservoirs using Hydro-fracturing: Technical and Economical Studies. },
 year = { 2014 }
}