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Investigating wellbore proppant transport and perforation erosion using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for a single hydraulic fracturing stage
Kebert, Brent Austin
Kebert, Brent Austin
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2020
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Abstract
Hydraulic fracturing has revolutionized the oil and gas industry in North America. At the forefront of the multistage hydraulic fracturing movement involving unconventional reservoirs, proppant transport plays a key role in the success and failure of well completions. Understanding the wellbore proppant transport properties can afford operating companies insight on how to improve current well completion designs. In this work, proppant transport is investigated in horizontal wellbores using the numerical solving capability of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).CFD is a numerical solver that allows for the simulation of real-world fluid flow situations. This work utilizes CFD to model proppant transport in a full scale multistage hydraulic fracturing completion stage. The goal of this work was to gain a better understanding of proppant distribution, corresponding to perforation clusters, across a hydraulically fractured stage. Included in the work, sensitivities regarding fluid viscosity, proppant size, fluid flow rate, and perforation design were simulated, analyzed, and compared in regard to proppant distribution and overall erosion rate. An extreme limited entry (XLE) completion design was used as the base stage perforation design. XLE is an industry leading perforation design. The XLE designs used in this work were used in actual field cases, and the modeling results are compared to field results.The results of this research identified proppant’s inertial forces to be a driving factor in proppant distribution and overall erosion rate. Particle inertial forces can be correlated with the Stokes number and act as a quantifiable measurement to determine the proppant’s dependence on the fracturing fluid. Reducing the particle inertia allows for a more even proppant distribution across the completion stage. Perforation exit angle, fluid flow rate, and misfired perforations have minimal impact on overall proppant distribution. The overallerosion rate generated from the proppant across the entire wellbore is primarily related to the particle inertia. Reducing the particle inertia does reduce the erosional capability of each proppant particle, but an increase in proppant concentration, or the number of proppant grains, can result in higher overall erosion.
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