S-Karra-Mechanistic-Approach-Part-2.pdf
Operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's NNSA Part 2: Reservoir-scale Fractured Systems Modeling Presentation by Satish Karra U.S. Department of Energy National Energy Technology Laboratory Mastering the Subsurface Through Technology Innovation, Partnerships and Collaboration: Carbon Storage and Oil and Natural Gas Technologies Review Meeting August 13-16, 2018 Mechanistic Approach to Analyzing and Improving Unconventional Hydrocarbon Production 8/15/18 Bill Carey, Luke Frash, George Guthrie, Qinjun Kang, Satish Karra, Nataliia Makedonska, Phong Nguyen, Nathan Welch, Hongwu Xu Overview of Project 8/15/18 Target: Enable technological solutions to improve recovery efficiency through an improved fundamental understanding Across Scales Karra @ 1:35 Carey @ 1:15 Kang @ 1:55 Los Alamos National Laboratory Technical Status: Reservoir-scale Fractured Systems Modeling 8/15/18 • Completed development of discrete fracture network tool for production curve calculations (large fractures + tributary fractures + matrix) • Completed analysis of influence of fracture geometry/topology on production curve • Incorporated effect of transient properties (e.g., aperture) in our DFN workflow Los Alamos National Laboratory Modeling Approach: Discrete Fracture Network (DFN) Modeling HORIZONTAL WELL HYDRAULIC FRACTURES NATURAL FRACTURES 8/15/18 200m x 200m x 200m 383 fractures – horizontal well, 6 hydraulic fractures DFN statistics from upper Pottsville formation [Jin 2003] Los Alamos National Laboratory dfnWorks R&D100 Winner in 2017 » Federal Technology Winner 2017 » Models flow and transport in fractured rock at scales from millimeters to kilometers » Uses unique meshing algorithms to represent realistic and accurate fracture networks » Enables modeling of nuclear waste disposal, oil & gas extraction from shale, mitigation of greenhouse gases and nuclear nonproliferation » Validated against site data from sites like Aspo, Sweden » Next version of dfnWorks will include graph-based methods for visualization and reduced order model simulations Los Alamos National Laboratory 8/15/18 Hydrocarbon Particles Flowing to the Well Initial HPC Calculations of Production flushing from fractures tail due to other smaller scale mechanisms Production Curve Hypothesis: Production curves reflect physical and chemical phenomena that change with time Karra et al. WRR 2015 Los Alamos National Laboratory 8/15/18 Tributary Fracture Zone and Matrix Incorporation 8/15/18 large fractures small fractures (tributary zone) & matrix Lovell et al. WRR 2018 •
