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)