Abstract
The accurate and efficient modeling of hydraulic fracture propagation is required to design optimal hydraulic fracture jobs in fractured tight rocks. To this end, we propose and demonstrate the first fixed-stress coupling of pEDFM with XFEM to model hydraulic fracture propagation in naturally fractured reservoirs. This addresses the limitation of EDFM to low-conductivity fractures and is much faster than DFM and fully coupled schemes, which have mostly been applied to the modeling of fracture propagation in fractured reservoirs. The validation studies presented indicate the accuracy of our model at reproducing the analytical solutions to coupled geomechanics and fracture propagation problems. We show that the iterative coupling of pEDFM with XFEM accounts for the interaction between the propagating hydraulic fracture and low-conductivity natural fractures in its vicinity, whereas EDFM does not. This is important when modeling hydraulic fracturing and the subsequent production from multiply fractured hydraulic wells. The iterative coupling approach used in this work provides the flexibility and simplicity needed to model complex fluid and rock behaviors in unconventional oil and gas reservoirs.
NSTL