Simulation of a Hydraulic Fracture Interacting with a Cemented Natural Fracture Using Displacement Discontinuity Method and Finite Volume Method

Excerpt

The intersection outcomes of hydraulic fracture (HF) and nature fracture (NF) have an important influence on the effect of fracturing treatment in shale reservoirs (Gale et al. 2014), which should be studied in detail. In recent decades, extensive experimental, analytical, and numerical studies have been conducted to investigate the influence of frictional NFs on the HF propagation (Zhang et al. 2007, 2008, 2009; Zhang and Jeffrey 2008; Xu et al. 2019). However, mineback experiments and field data suggest that the cemented NFs also play a fundamental role in HF propagation (Warpinski and Teufel 1987). Some researchers attempted to investigate the HF/cemented NF interaction qualitatively by laboratory experiments (Bahorich et al. 2012; Sarmadivaleh 2012). To provide quantitative information on the HF/cemented NF interaction outcomes for fracturing treatment, several numerical solutions have been developed to investigate the complex HF/cemented NF interaction (Sarmadivaleh 2012; Wang et al. 2018; Chen et al. 2019). These numerical models have been used to study the interaction between an HF and a cemented NF and the relative roles of various parameters, such as intersection angle, the strength of the filling material, in situ stress, and mechanical properties of host rock. However, the influence of fracturing treatment parameters has hardly been studied, which is meaningful for fracturing treatment design. In addition, offset behavior as one of HF/cemented NF intersection outcomes is often observed in laboratory and mineback experiments (Jeffrey et al. 2009; Sarmadivaleh 2012), but has not been studied systematically. …