T2_Modeling Hydraulic Fractured Gas Wells Using CMG using CMG –IMEX Simulator

(BLACKOIL MODEL)

Introduction

In CMG tutorial 1, we discussed to build a reservoir model with two vertical wells. In tight sand
gas reservoirs, conventional recovery method is not powerful enough to get a satisfying
production. Horizontal wellbore with multiple stage hydraulic fracture is widely implemented in
the development of tight sand gas formations.

In this tutorial session, we are going to study how to use CMG to model hydraulic fracture and
horizontal wellbore.

Local Grid Refinement (LGR) is one of the most important reservoir simulation techniques
which refine the grid block at the point of interest into finer grid blocks.

Representation of horizontal wellbore Representation of horizontal wellbore

in a coarse block system in a LGR block system

It provides small enough grids to approximate complex well structure such as horizontal wells,
slanted wells and fishbone wells. Moreover, LGR could be implemented to model multiple-stage
hydraulic fracture. CMG provides powerful simulation models coupling LGR.

In this tutorial, we will have a two-section discussion:

Section 1: Modeling Horizontal Wellbore
Section 2: Modeling Multiple-stage Hydraulic Fracture

In appendix, we introduced how to add LGR grids manually to any of the coarse block.

Section 1 Modeling Horizontal Wellbore

Step 1 open the .dat file of tutorial T1

Go to the CMG Technology Launcher. Drag the .dat file built in tutorial 1 to the Builder
Win_64 2012.20 icon (Or other latest versions of CMG).
The model will show up. Go to file->Save as to save the file under another name. For
instance “IMEX_horizontal.dat”

In this exercise, we will use a tighter system. Go to Reservoir > double click the Array
Properties.
Change the permeability I, J, K to 0.001 md
Step 2 Delete all the existing wells in the model

In this exercise, we need to add a horizontal well to our model. So the first thing to do is to
delete all the existing wells. Right click Wells and select Delete.

Check all the two check boxes and press OK to delete the two wells.
Step 3 Define the horizontal producer specification

According to our boss’s proposal, this horizontal well extends from block (6,7,1) towards
North and ends at block (6,3,1). Right click Well and select New. Change the type to
PRODUCER.

Set the constraint of the well as constant bottomhole pressure at 100 psi and pressure OK.
Step 4 Define Horizontal Wellbore Extension

Double click the 2014-01-01 PERF and click the Perforation TAB
Click the Begin button to start to define the well block address. The horizontal wellbore
starts at block (4, 8, 1). Left click on blocks in the order of (4, 8, 1), (4, 7, 1),
(4, 6, 1), (4, 5, 1), (4, 4, 1). Please make sure to follow the order when
clicking on the blocks!
Press Apply and OKNow the horizontal wellbore is placed in the reservoir.

One can try to gain the same 3D view showing the wellbore extension with a cut surface.

First change the view option from IJ-2D Areal to 3D view.

Click on the knife icon in the toolbox bar to make a cut.

Select Vertical Cut Plane between Well Perfs and select two different perforation
addresses to make the cut plane and then press OK.
Now it is a good time to save our model with a horizontal well. We may also run the model and
once we finish placing the hydraulic fracture, we can compare the cases with/without hydraulic
fracture to observe the different on production profile.

Please save and run this model, horizontal well without fracture before we
move to the next step.
 Section 2 Modeling Multiple-stage Hydraulic Fracture
Step 5 Adding Hydraulic Fracture to the Horizontal Wellbore

First of all bring the reservoir view back to 2D Areal view.

We may save our model in another file since we do not want to erase the case without fracture.
Go to File > Save as to save the model as another .DAT file. For example, save the model as
“PNG492_horizontal_withFracture.dat” (or any name you would like).

In Wells & Recurrent select Hydraulic Fractured Wells

The following window will popped up. First left click on the data when we are going to put the
hydraulic fracture. For this case it is 2014-01-01.
Once we select the data, go to the Tools > Add new fractures
Once the fracture is added to the well (for this exercise, it is Well-1 with Frac 1), we need to
select the fracture and edit the parameters.

First of all select the fracture.

Then justify the Number of refined blocks in each direction to I=5, J=5, K=1. This means
CMG will chop the coarse blocks where the hydraulic fracture will be created into 5 finer
blocks along I direction, 5 blocks along J direction and 1 blocks along K direction.

Afterwards, we may input these critical parameters regarding the hydraulic fracture:

 Primary fracture width, 1ft: the width of the fracture. In reality, the width of the
fracture is much smaller than 1 ft. But in CMG model, there is a limitation that the
grid block cannot be smaller than the wellbore radius (for this case rw = 0.25 ft).
 Primary fracture permeability, 5000 md: the permeability in the hydraulic fracture.
 Orientation, I axis: the orientation along which the fracture will propagate. In this
case, our well is along the J direction. Thus, we will place the hydraulic fracture
perpendicular the wellbore.
 Half length: 400 ft
 Number of refined layers up/down: this parameter controls the local grid refinery
along the K direction. Suppose we have a model with one more layer and LGR will
be implemented along K direction. We need to tell CMG how many layers we are
 going to refine along K direction. For this case, we have 1 layer model. So we may
assign ‘1’ to these parameters.

Then press APPLY (NOTICE, DO NOT PRESS OK at this stage. Otherwise every
setting will disappear).

Select all perforated layers for the perforation and leave the horizontal well settings as
default. Press Ok
Now, CMG create the hydraulic fracture for us with local grid refined blocks.

We can view our reservoir by zoom the model into the near well bore region to look at the
finer grid blocks with higher permeability.
Hydraulic fracture
Step 6 Modification of the Numerical Control

Once LGR is employed in a reservoir model, the simulator will need a smaller time step to get to
a convergence. For this exercise:

We will use 1e-7 day as the First time step after well change. We may change this value first

We will use 1e-8 day as our minimum time step and

Change this value first

Please note that the more complex the simulation model is the smaller time step it may need
to get a convergence.

Now our model should be good to run. Run the model with hydraulic fracture and next step
we will compare the results to observe the production incremental.
Step 7 Run the models with hydraulic fracture and compare the results

Once we finish our run for the case with hydraulic fracture and the case without hydraulic
fracture, we would like to see how the hydraulic fracture helps regarding the production profiles.

First we need to open the .irf file for the two runs. In this tutorial, we save our model as
IMEX_tutorial_with_Fracture and IMEX_tutorial_without_Fracture. And we will have two
CMG output files : IMEX_tutorial_with_Fracture.irf and IMEX_tutorial_without_Fracture.irf.

Then drag the IMEX_tutorial_with_Fracture.irf to Result Graph Win_x64 to open the CMG
plotting module.
In Result Graph Win_x64 module, go to File> Open CMG Simulation Results.

Find the other simulation output (IMEX_tutorial_without_Fracture.irf), which is the run without
hydraulic fracture, and press Open
Now we can generate plots from the two runs.

Once we are trying to generate plot, there is an option for us to select one of the two CMG output
file. We could select either of them for plotting.
For this tutorial, we plot the cumulative gas production and the gas rate as an example.
It is observed that the gas rate cannot be clearly plot on regular Cartesian coordinator, we
can plot out gas rate on semi-log plot.

First right click on the y-axis of the plot and click on Properties.
In tab Axis, change the type to log and Apply.
Now we can plot the gas rate on the semi-log plot.

The observation is that hydraulic fracture helps boost the production in tight system
tremendously.
 Appendix How to refine coarse block in CMG
In this exercise, we will use the reservoir model with horizontal wellbore and NO fracture as
an example. The following picture shows the original model without LGR.

1. Select the Edit Grid Mode

Then the following window will show up. Click OK

For this exercise, we will refine the block of the horizontal wellbore. We can drag and select
all the coarse blocks which the well penetrated.
2. Go to Reservoir > Edit Grid> Refine Blocks
A refinement wizard will help us to refine the selected blocks
In this exercise, we will refine each well block in to 3×3×1 finer blocks
Press Finish.
Now, the horizontal well blocks are refined. We can now take advantage of this model to
make the wellbore partially penetrate a coarse block.