Development of a fully integrated equation of state compositional hydraulic fracturing and reservoir simulator

Numerical modeling plays a key role in assessing, developing, and managing energy resources (such as oil, gas and heat) from subsurface formations. Fluids are injected into wellbores during hydraulic fracturing, water flooding, parent well pre-loading, and improved oil recovery. Oil, gas and water are produced back to the surface during flowback, primary/secondary/tertiary production, and geothermal operations. Results from modeling these subsurface energy resources assist engineers and geologists in the decision-making process. Geomechanics, fluid/solid flow, and heat transport are coupled in the reservoir, fracture, and wellbore domains. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop integrated hydraulic fracturing and reservoir simulator that can accurately model multi-component, multi-phase fluid flow, geomechanics, fracture propagation and thermal processes in the reservoir, fracture and wellbore domains. In this dissertation, fully coupled reservoir, fracture, and wellbore domains are modeled. Geomechanics, fluid flow, and heat transport are modeled in an integrated manner in each domain and between each domain. Thermo-poro-elasticity, fracture opening/closing, and fracture propagation are modeled based on the stresses and strains computed in the domain. Four flow types including single-phase flow, multi-phase black-oil flow, multi-phase compositional flow, and water-steam two-phase flow are developed for different applications. Temperature and enthalpy formulations are developed to model the energy balance within the fully coupled system. A novel proppant transport model formulation which couples fracture opening/closing has also been developed. The governing equations are discretized in space using the finite volume/area methods. Multiple fully implicit Newton solvers have been developed to solve different sets of nonlinear systems of equations. A fully distributed memory parallelization workflow is constructed. The simulator is also coupled with simpler (analytical and DDM) fracturing models to achieve shorter run times. The modeling capability of the simulator has been demonstrated in the dissertation through many example applications. Typical applications of the simulator include multi-stage, multi-cluster, hydraulic fracture propagation, proppant settling and fracture closure analysis, mini-frac analysis, parent-child well interference, fracture monitoring, reservoir cooling and induced fracture propagation from water injectors, production analysis, gas huff-n-puff injection, improved oil recovery, geothermal reservoir production, and enhanced geothermal system analysis. These applications demonstrate the wide variety of problems that our simulator can be used to model.