SPE Reservoir Evaluation & Engineering
Volume 15, Number 1, February 2012, pp. 51-59

Summary

Hydraulically fractured vertical and horizontal wells completed in shale gas and some tight gas plays are known to exhibit long periods of linear flow. Recently, techniques for analyzing this flow period using (normalized) production data have been put forth, but there are known errors associated with the analysis. In this paper, linear flow from fractured wells completed in tight/shale gas reservoirs--subject to a constant-production-rate constraint--is studied. We show analytically that the square-root-of-time plot (a plot of rate-normalized pressure vs. square root of time that is commonly used to interpret linear flow) depends on the production rate. We also show that depending on production rate, the square-root/time plot may not be a straight line during linear flow; the higher the production rate, the earlier in time the plot deviates from the expected straight line. This deviation creates error in the analysis. To address this issue, a new analytical method is developed for analyzing linear-flow data for the constant-gas-rate production constraint. The method is then validated using a number of numerically simulated cases. As expected, on the basis of the analytical derivation, the square-root/time plots for these cases depend on gas-production rate and, for some cases, the plot does not appear as a straight line during linear flow. Finally, we found that there is excellent agreement between the fracture half-lengths obtained using this method and the input fracture half-lengths entered in to numerical simulation.

© 2012. Society of Petroleum Engineers

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History

• Original manuscript received: 15 May 2011
• Meeting paper published: 14 June 2011
• Revised manuscript received: 10 September 2011
• Manuscript approved: 7 November 2011
• Published online: 13 February 2012
• Version of record: 29 February 2012