Summary Slickwater fracturing has become one of the most leveraging completion technologies in unlocking hydrocarbon in unconventional reservoirs. In slickwater treatments, proppant transport becomes a big concern because of the inefficiency of low-viscosity fluids to suspend the particles. Many studies have been devoted to proppant transport experimentally and numerically. However, only a few focused on the proppant pumping schedules in slickwater fracturing. The impact of proppant schedules on well production remains unclear. The goal of our work is to simulate the proppant transport under real pumping schedules (multisize proppants and varying concentration) at the field scale and quantitatively evaluate the effects of proppant schedules on well production for slickwater fracturing. The workflow consists of three steps. First, a validated 3D multiphase particle-in-cell (MP-PIC) model has been used to simulate the proppant transport at real pumping schedules in a field-scale fracture (180-m length, 30-m height). Second, we applied a propped fracture conductivity model to calculate the distribution of propped fracture width, permeability, and fracture conductivity. In the last step, we incorporated the fracture geometry, propped fracture conductivity, and the estimated unpropped fracture conductivity into a reservoir simulation model to predict gas production. Based on the field designs of pumping schedules inmore »
Multi-Size Proppant Pumping Schedule of Hydraulic Fracturing: Application to a MP-PIC Model of Unconventional Reservoir for Enhanced Gas Production
Slickwater hydraulic fracturing is becoming a prevalent approach to economically recovering shale hydrocarbon. It is very important to understand the proppant’s transport behavior during slickwater hydraulic fracturing treatment for effective creation of a desired propped fracture geometry. The currently available models are either oversimplified or have been performed at limited length scales to avoid high computational requirements. Another limitation is that the currently available hydraulic fracturing simulators are developed using only single-sized proppant particles. Motivated by this, in this work, a computationally efficient, three-dimensional, multiphase particle-in-cell (MP-PIC) model was employed to simulate the multi-size proppant transport in a field-scale geometry using the Eulerian–Lagrangian framework. Instead of tracking each particle, groups of particles (called parcels) are tracked, which allows one to simulate the proppant transport in field-scale geometries at an affordable computational cost. Then, we found from our sensitivity study that pumping schedules significantly affect propped fracture surface area and average fracture conductivity, thereby influencing shale gas production. Motivated by these results, we propose an optimization framework using the MP-PIC model to design the multi-size proppant pumping schedule that maximizes shale gas production from unconventional reservoirs for given fracturing resources.
- Award ID(s):
- 1804407
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10188324
- Journal Name:
- Processes
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 5
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 570
- ISSN:
- 2227-9717
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- https://doi.org/10.3390/pr8050570
