Study on the Imbibition Damage Mechanisms of Fracturing Fluid for the Whole Fracturing Process in a Tight Sandstone Gas Reservoir

Dongjin Xu, Shihai Chen, Jinfeng Chen, Jinshan Xue and Huan Yang
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Dongjin Xu: Key Laboratory of Exploration Technologies for Oil and Gas Resources, Ministry of Education, Yangtze University, Wuhan 430100, China
Shihai Chen: Shaanxi Yan’an Oil & Natural Gas Corp. Ltd., Xi’an 710018, China
Jinfeng Chen: The Fourth Oil Production Plant, Petrochina Huabei Oilfield Company, Langfang 065000, China
Jinshan Xue: The Fourth Oil Production Plant, Petrochina Huabei Oilfield Company, Langfang 065000, China
Huan Yang: Department of Petroleum Engineering, College of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071-2000, USA

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 12, 1-10

Abstract: Tight sandstone gas is a significant unconventional natural gas resource, and has been exploited economically mostly through the application of hydraulic fracturing technology in recent decades. However, formation damage occurs when fracturing fluid percolates into the pores inside sandstones through imbibition driven by capillary pressure during fracturing operations. In this work, the formation damage resulting from the whole operation process composed of fracturing, well shut-in and flowback, and the degree of damage at different moments were investigated through core flow experiments and the low-field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) technique. The results show that imbibition damage occurs starting from the contact surface between the formation and the fracturing fluid, which penetrates into an increasingly deep position with time down to a certain depth. The T2 spectra of NMR at different moments indicates that fracturing fluid initially enters the small pores, followed by the large pores due to the larger capillary pressure in the former. Thus, the sandstone cores with low permeability incur a higher degree of damage due to their stronger capability of retaining fracturing fluid compared to high-permeability cores. The front position of the fracturing fluid imbibition at different moments, along with the degree of damage, were characterized through the one-dimensional encoding processing of the NMR signal. These results underlie the effective strategy to relieve formation damage resulting from imbibition during hydraulic fracturing operations.

Keywords: tight sandstone gas; low-field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance; linxing gas field; imbibition damage; imbibition experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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