Investigation of low water recovery based on gas-water two-phase low-velocity Non-Darcy flow model for hydraulically fractured horizontal wells in shale

Abstract

Various mechanisms are employed to interpret the low water recovery during the shale-gas production period, such as extra-trapped water in the fracture network, water imbibition due to osmotic pressure and capillary pressure. These lead to the difficulty of water flow, which could be described by low-velocity non-Darcy's law known as threshold pressure gradient (TPG). In this paper we firstly employ the low-velocity non-Darcy's law to describe the water flow and use Darcy flow accounting for slip flow and free molecular flow mechanisms to model gas flow in the shale formation. The sensitive study using numerical simulation shows that the proposed flow model could model the low fracturing liquid recovery and that large pseudo TPG leads to lower fracturing liquid recovery. Thus, the proposed model would give new insight to model the low water recovery in shale formations.

Keywords

Low water recovery / Low-velocity non-Darcy flow / Pseudo threshold pressure gradient / Hydraulically fractured horizontal wells / Shale gas

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 1217020361). All data used in numerical modeling are available in literature and are cited in this manuscript.

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