Completion Designs in Horizontal Well with Transverse Hydraulic Fractures for Enhanced Recovery in Unconventional or Tight Reservoirs

Abstract

Low recovery, 2 to 15%, in unconventional plays (including tight reservoirs and source rocks) has long been recognized as a business deterrent. The industry applies enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques, along with hydraulic fractures in tight/unconventional plays, to improve the recovery. To maximize matrix sweep, the fractures are aligned in a face-to-face assembly. Such an arrangement can be achieved using a vertical or longitudinal hydraulic fracture on horizontal wells, but these, generally, do not provide as effective reservoir contact (hydraulic fracture surface area) as horizontal wells with multistage transverse hydraulic fractures. The multistage transverse hydraulic fracture, however, comes at the costs of conformance issues with early water breakthrough from short-circuiting and inability to achieve fracture face-to-fracture face alignment of the injection and production fractures. The vast majority of wells drilled in unconventional plays are in the transverse configuration; hence, there is a need for an optimal solution for transverse fractures combined with improved oil recovery (IOR)/EOR approaches. In this work, we introduce the multistage enhanced recovery (MS-ER) techniques that enable face-to-face alignment for optimal enhanced hydrocarbon recovery (EHR)/IOR/EOR in horizontal wells with multistage transverse fractures, thereby enabling optimal recovery and mitigating the key risk of fracture short-circuiting.