Shale Gas Reservoir Simulation Workflow

Shale gas reservoir development has gained more importance in the past few years with the growing demand for gas and the advancement in oilfield technologies. Modeling and simulation of shale gas reservoirs pose a unique problem.

These reservoirs have distinct properties, such as

• nano-Darcy matrix permeability, which makes flow virtually impossible
• narrow, calcite-sealed natural fractures reactivated during hydraulic fracturing, which is the primary enabling technology to produce gas
• complex fracture network distribution resulting from the presence of both natural and induced fractures
• adsorbed gas in organic materials, making up nearly 50% of the gas content in some of the reservoirs.

Some of the challenges in developing a shale gas reservoir include

• spacing wells to optimize gas production and the cost of developing the field
• creating a completion and stimulation strategy to determine the hydraulic fracture stage spacing
• quantifying the producible volumes to estimate the reserves and ultimate recovery.

ECLIPSE and Petrel simulation software accurately simulate the physics of shale gas reservoirs and model natural and induced fracture networks.

Capabilities

• Multiporosity system
• Discretized matrix subgrids that account for transient flow in matrix
• Multicomponent Langmuir adsorption isotherms for instant sorption and time-dependent sorption
• Interblock non-Darcy, or turbulent, flow and flow-dependent skin
• Multisegmented wells for variable inflow modeling of perforation clusters along wellbores
• Sensitivity analysis for volumetric calculations using the new coal/shale gas plug-in to generate coal and shale gas-specific keywords in a seamless Petrel ECLIPSE workflow
• Simulation using local grid refinements around hydraulic fractures
• Uncertainty analysis and history-matching to refine predictions of future reservoir performance

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