Pressurized-fracture propagation using a phase-field approach coupled to a reservoir simulator

authored by
Thomas Wick, Gurpreet Singh, Mary F. Wheeler
Abstract

Tight gas and shale oil play an important role in energy security and meeting an increasing energy demand. Hydrualic fracturing is a widely used technology for recovering these resources. Prediction of fracture growth during slick-water injection and final geometry for single and muti-stage hydraulic allows quantitative assessment of frac-job scenarios. A recently introduced phase-field approach for pressurized fractures in a porous medium offers various attractive computational features for numerical simulations of cracks such as joining, branching, and non-planar propagation for heterogeneous porous media. In this study, we employ the phase-field fracture propagation model is used as a pre-processor in order to couple it to a fractured poroelastic reservoir simulator. This offers the possibility to simulate the entire scenario from hydraulic fracturing to the production process. The proposed algorithm is based on a one-way coupling and is therefore easy to adapt to existing legacy reservoir simulators. The phase-field model can be seen as a fracture-well-model in the reservoir simulator. The key idea behind this strategy is the possibility to couple reservoir and fracture flow in the phase-field formulation from which we obtain an initial condition for the reservoir simulator. Our proposed framework is substantiated with several numerical tests in two- and three dimensions.

External Organisation(s)
University of Texas at Austin
Type
Conference contribution
Pages
242-252
No. of pages
11
Publication date
2014
Publication status
Published
Peer reviewed
Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Management of Technology and Innovation
Sustainable Development Goals
SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy
Electronic version(s)
https://doi.org/10.2118/168597-ms (Access: Unknown)