Innovative use of rate-transient analysis methods to obtain hydraulic-fracture properties for low-permeability reservoirs exhibiting multiphase flow

Abstract Multifractured horizontal wells, while enabling commercial production from unconventional gas and light-oil reservoirs, are challenging to analyze quantitatively to obtain reservoir and hydraulic-fracture properties. Production rates and flowing pressures gathered immediately after hydraulic-fracture stimulation (flowback) and over a longer time period (on-line production) can be interpreted for hydraulic-fracture properties such as fracture surface area or half-length and fracture conductivity, but dynamic fracture properties and multiphase flow during both stages of production can complicate the analysis. Recent studies have suggested that flowback data can provide early insight into these fracture properties if high-resolution fluid rates/pressures are gathered, but the physics of the process are complex, and analytic methods for interpretation are at an early stage of development. Analytic methods for longer-term production data analysis, although better established, are still limited primari...