Real-time hydraulic fracture monitoring and wellbore characterization with distributed acoustic sensing of pumping noise

Abstract

The strong and regular acoustic signal provided by working pumps spreads along a well based on wellbore geometrical and physical attributes. This signal can be used to devise well properties through the interpretation of distributed acoustic data collected along a zone of interest. Any well feature that is an irregularity of the well scheme, such as tubing expansion, fluid-to-fluid interface, or an adjacent hydraulic fracture, porous reservoir, or annular compartment, can be characterized this way. Every pump generates a plurality of harmonic frequencies; thus, there are plenty of data for inversion for feature parameters. We describe a quantitative inversion workflow and give synthetic examples of hydraulic fracture monitoring and hydraulic port open/closure condition monitoring. We also stress that interference of the pump signal by the flow noise signal should be accounted for in distributed acoustic sensing interpretation.