A Two-Phase Type-Curve Method with Fracture Damage Effects for Hydraulically Fractured Reservoirs

Type-curve analysis on flowback and production data is a powerful tool in characterizing hydraulic fractures (HF) and reservoir properties. In order to evaluate HF characteristics and their dynamics for multi-fractured horizontal wells (MFHWs) in hydrocarbon reservoirs, we provide a novel type-curve method and an iterative workflow. The type curve incorporates the fracture damage effect, which is characterized by choked-fracture skin factor, into the two-phase flow in HF and matrix domains. The type-curve method can be applied to inversely estimate choked-fracture skin factor, fracture pore-volume, fracture premeability, and fracture permeability modulus through the analysis of two-phase production data. By introducing the new dimensionless parameters, the non-uniqueness problem of the proposed semianalytical method is significantly reduced by incorporating the complexity of fracture dynamics into one set of curves. The proposed type curve's accuracy is examined by numerical simulations of a shale gas and shale oil reservoir. The validation results demonstrate the good match of analytical type curves and numerical data plots and confirms the accuracy of the proposed approach in estimating the static and dynamic fracture properties. The flexibility and robustness of the proposed method are illustrated using the field example from a shale oil MFHW. The interpreted results from the flowback analysis of the field example offers a quantitative insight of fracture properties and dynamics.