PRODUCTIVITY OF FRACTURED HORIZONTAL WELLS

Abstract

The interest and performance of horizontal drilling and completions has increased during the last two decades. Horizontal wells are advantageous compared to vertical wells in thin reservoirs, reservoirs with favorable vertical permeability and reservoirs with water and gas coning problems. In many reservoirs, the ratio of horizontal permeability to the vertical permeability is substantially larger than one and often is close to 10. Thus, these reservoirs are very good candidates for hydraulic fracturing. By hydraulic fracturing one or more fractures are created, which can be longitudinal or orthogonal. By that, flow is altered and it mostly conducts horizontally through reservoir toward horizontal wellbore. With this altered flow, fluid is produced faster, with less pressure loss by fluid unit of produced fluid. Some of the existing mathematical models to determine the productivity of multifractured horizontal wells are presented in this work (the paper is published in Croatian).

Keywords

• horizontal wells
• hydraulic fracturing
• transversal fractures
• longitudinal fractures