fracturing

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gas reservoirs

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egfp

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fractal_100557

discrete fracture

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fractured reservoirs

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history matching_75225

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SPE Journal

Summary Most unconventional oil and gas reservoirs are known to have several natural fractures in different orientations, which are consistent with the prevailing stresses when they were created. The accurate and efficient modeling of natural and hydraulic fractures presents a significant computational challenge. In this work, we show the limitations of the embedded discrete-fracture model (EDFM) and present the first 3D projection-based EDFM (pEDFM) algorithm and compositional simulation studies with realistic fracture networks in a fully 3D space. The simulation results from this work indicate that the pEDFM presented can model realistic fractured unconventional reservoirs accurately and efficiently. To validate the model, we present some simplistic fracture cases that can be meshed and modeled easily using explicit-fracture modeling in commercial-reservoir simulators. From the cases studied, we observe that using progressively finer grids near the hydraulic-fracture surfaces helps to improve model accuracy because this allows us to capture the sharp pressure drops expected near these fracture surfaces. The simulation results show that, unlike EDFM, the robust pEDFM algorithm presented here is accurate even at the low fracture-conductivity values expected in many of these ubiquitous natural fractures. In this paper, we present the first full 3D compositional modeling with pEDFM. We demonstrate that our model can accurately and efficiently model multiply fractured horizontal wells in unconventional reservoirs, which have complex networks of thousands of fractures at various orientations.

Three-Dimensional Projection-Based Embedded Discrete-Fracture Model for Compositional Simulation of Fractured Reservoirs