Taking Advantage of Hydraulic Fracturing to Improve Gas/condensate Recovery - A Case Study

Hydraulic fracturing is one of the most proposed methods to overcome the condensate banking problem around a gas condensate well. This paper investigates the effects of hydraulic fracturing on gas/condensate recovery in one of the world's largest gas condensate fields located in the Middle East. Accumulation of the condensate around a few numbers of wells of this field has resulted in severe deliverability loss. In this study a single compositional well model was constructed and well test data were used to validate the model. The fracture was described as a thin vertical layer positioned symmetrical at the center of the model and the properties of fracture were assigned to this thin layer. A vast number of simulation runs were performed in order to investigate the effects of different parameters on the well production performance. The results showed that hydraulic fracture can significantly improve productivity of this giant field wells and the permeability-width product must be maximized and increasing fracture length would not result in much benefit and the optimum half-length of hydraulic fracture is 125m. Also the effects of negative inertia and positive coupling are dominant in the matrix and the fracture, respectively.