TRIDIMENSIONAL MODELING OF HYDRAULIC FRACTURING USING SOLID FINITE ELEMENTS WITH HIGH ASPECT RATIO

Débora Cristina Almeida de Assis¹; Leonardo José do Nascimento Guimarães¹; LEILA B. DE S. BESERRA¹; LEIDY LAURA ÀLVAREZ BERRÍO¹; IGOR FERNANDES GOMES¹

¹ Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

doi:10.20906/CPS/CILAMCE2017-0904

Resumo

The difficulty of find new conventional oil reserves sufficient to supply the demand for oil and its derivatives in worldwide, promotes the exploration of unconventional reserves. The unconventional reservoir has physical, geological and exploratory different characteristics, when compared to conventional fields. To ensure the production of hydrocarbons at economically acceptable levels is used the technique which inject a fluid fracturing into the formation, under a pressure high enough to cause the rupture of the rock by traction, hydraulic fracturing. This study presents a fracturing simulation using the Mesh Fragmentation Technique - MFT, which inserts high aspect ratio elements in-between standard elements of a finite element mesh. It also presents the use of the program developed for the generation of three-dimensional models of fractured reservoirs. We show a 3D simulation of a reservoir model composed of two set of fracture families, each family with distinct properties, with a total of thirty-five fractures. The results of the simulations show that the proposed technique is able to simulate three-dimensional problems of the hydraulic fracturing.

Palavras-chave: hydraulic fracturing; three-dimensional modeling; Mesh Fragmentation Technique