Uniform fracture growth using engineered solid particulate diverters

摘要

Hydraulic fracturing is an essential tool for economic production from low-permeability reservoirs.However,upon stimulation,these reservoirs typically experience an initial high production rate but fast decline within few months after reaching p eak rate and usually results in low recovery efficiency especially in unconventionals.This type of production decline has been commonly observed in different plays around the world,including the Barnett and Vaca Muerta.These practices also revealed that only limited number of planned clusters contribute to overall production.As statistically analyzed on multiple wells from different unconventional plays,nearly one third of the planned clusters might not be active and cannot flow back any hydrocarbon,due to their low hydraulic fracturing efficiency.For these non-productive clusters,the hydraulic fractures cannot be created or fully propagated into the far-field region and hence the number and extent of developed fractures is much smaller than expected.This anomaly can be mainly attributed to the hydraulic fracture initiation and propagation in the near wellbore vicinity.Operators have been searching for practical solutions to fully understand this unexpected phenomenon and to maximize sweep efficiency and hence overall production from their assets.The variation of fracture potential,which is a complex function of multiple geomechanical and reservoir properties,could change the fracture initiation and propagation.