Dynamic Fracture Characterization From Tracer-Test and Flow-Rate Data With Ensemble Kalman Filter

Abstract

Summary Hydraulic fracturing is performed to enable production from low-permeability and organic-rich shale-oil/gas reservoirs by stimulating the rock to increase its permeability. Characterization and imaging of hydraulically induced fractures is critical for accurate prediction of production and of the stimulated reservoir volume (SRV). Recorded tracer concentrations during flowback and historical production data can reveal important information about fracture and matrix properties, including fracture geometry, hydraulic conductivity, and natural-fracture density. However, the complexity and uncertainty in fracture and reservoir descriptions, coupled with data limitations, complicate the estimation of these properties. In this paper, tracer-test and production data are used for dynamic characterization of important parameters of hydraulically fractured reservoirs, including matrix permeability and porosity, planar-fracture half-length and hydraulic conductivity, discrete-fracture-network (DFN) density and conductivity, and fracture-closing (conductivity-decline) rate during production. The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is used to update uncertain model parameters by sequentially assimilating first the tracer-test data and then the production data. The results indicate that the tracer-test and production data have complementary information for estimating fracture half-length and conductivity, with the former being more sensitive to hydraulic conductivity and the latter being more affected by fracture half-length. For characterization of DFN, a stochastic representation is adopted and the parameters of the stochastic model along with matrix and hydraulic-fracture properties are updated. Numerical examples are presented to investigate the sensitivity of the observed production and tracer-test data to fracture and matrix properties and to evaluate the EnKF performance in estimating these parameters.