Multiphase transient analysis of flowback and early production data of unconventional gas wells

Analysis of fracturing water flowback data from hydraulic fractures in unconventional reservoirs plays an important role in determining key fracture properties and predicting future well performance. Current flowback data analysis tools mostly rely on empirical correlations and/or simplified models. This paper presents a semi-analytical, multiphase solution that is applicable to the analysis of not only water flowback but early gas production data of multi-fractured horizontal gas wells. The proposed solution couples a Green's function-based analytical solution for gas flow in matrix with a finite-difference numerical solution for two-phase (gas and water) flow in fracture domain. The validity of proposed semi-analytical solution is verified against simulation results generated using commercial numerical simulators. Inverse analysis techniques are developed based on the proposed semi-analytical solution and presented in the form of type curves. Synthetic case studies show that the proposed type-curve methods can provide explicit and accurate estimation of fracture and reservoir properties, including fracture conductivity, and fracture pore volume. For all case tested, the proposed model is shown to provide accurate and consistent prediction of reservoir performance and estimations of fracture properties while maintaining the simplicity of explicit, iteration-free calculations.