Influence of Fracture Types on Oil Production in Naturally Fractured Reservoirs

Milos Pejic, Riyaz Kharrat, Ali Kadkhodaie, Siroos Azizmohammadi and Holger Ott ()
Additional contact information
Milos Pejic: Department Petroleum Engineering, Montanuniversität Leoben, 8700 Leoben, Austria
Riyaz Kharrat: Department Petroleum Engineering, Montanuniversität Leoben, 8700 Leoben, Austria
Ali Kadkhodaie: Earth Sciences Department, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Tabriz, Tabriz 51666-16471, Iran
Siroos Azizmohammadi: Department Petroleum Engineering, Montanuniversität Leoben, 8700 Leoben, Austria
Holger Ott: Department Petroleum Engineering, Montanuniversität Leoben, 8700 Leoben, Austria

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 19, 1-20

Abstract: Since more than half of the crude oil is deposited in naturally fractured reservoirs, more research has been focused on characterizing and understanding the fracture impact on their production performance. Naturally open fractures are interpreted from Fullbore Formation Micro-Imaging (FMI) logs. According to the fracture aperture, they are classified as major, medium, minor and hairy fractures in decreasing order of their respective aperture size. Different fracture types were set up in this work as a Discrete Fracture Network (DFN) in synthetic models and a sector model from a highly naturally fractured carbonate reservoir. The field sector model includes four wells containing image logs from two wells and production data from two other wells. Numerous simulations were conducted to capture the contribution of fracture type on production performance. Primary recovery was used for synthetic and field sector models, while waterflooding and gas injection scenarios were considered just for the synthetic models. The results showed that the fracture type and its extent play an essential role in production for all studied models. The reservoir production capabilities might be underestimated by ignoring any fracture types present in the reservoir, especially the major ones. In the secondary recovery, fractures had different impacts. Better displacement and higher recovery were promoted for waterflooding, whereas faster breakthrough times were observed for the gas injection. The performance during gas injection was more dependent on fracture permeability changes than waterflooding. This study’s findings can help in better understanding the impact of the different types of fracture networks on oil recovery at the various production stages. Additionally, the history matching process can be improved by including all types of fractures in the dynamic model. Any simplification of the fracture types might end in overestimating or underestimating the oil recovery.

Keywords: fractured reservoirs; DFN; fracture types; dual permeability; oil recovery; water injection; gas injection (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 references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/19/7321/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/19/7321/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:15:y:2022:i:19:p:7321-:d:933969

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().