Preloading Depleted Parent Wells To Avoid Fracture Hits: Some Important Design Considerations

Summary Mitigating the negative impact of fracture hits on production from parent and child wells is challenging. This work shows the impact of parent-well depletion and repressurization on child-well fracture propagation and parent-well productivity. The goal of this study is to develop a method to better manage production/injection in the parent well so that the performance of the child well can be improved by minimizing fracture interference and fracture hits. A fully integrated equation-of-state compositional hydraulic fracturing and reservoir simulator has been developed to seamlessly model fluid production/injection (water or gas) in the parent well and model propagation of multiple fractures from the child well. The effects of drawdown rate and production time is presented for a typical shale play for three different fluid types: black oil, volatile oil, and dry gas. The results show that different reservoir fluids and drawdown strategies for the parent wells result in different stress distributions in the depleted zone, and this affects fracture propagation in the child well. Different strategies were studied to repressurize the parent well by varying the injected fluids (gas vs. water), the volumes of the preload fluid, and so on. It was found that fracture hits can be avoided if the fluid injection strategy is designed appropriately. In some poorly designed preloading strategies, fracture hits are still observed. Last, the impact of preloading on the parent-well productivity was analyzed. When water was used for preloading, water blocking was observed in the reservoir, and it caused damage to the parent well. However, when gas was injected for preloading, the oil recovery from the parent well was observed to increase. Such simulations of parent–child well interactions provide much-needed quantification to predict and mitigate the damage caused by depletion, fracture interference, and fracture hits.