Hydraulic fracturing is recognized as the primary technique to achieve economic oil and gas production from low permeability reservoirs like shale and tight-sand formations. One of the main challenges facing the oil and gas industry is maintaining the proppant functionality in the subsurface where replacement of proppant is only possible by expensive refracturing operations. Proppant crushing and proppant embedment have posed challenges for sustainable production from stimulated wells especially in soft and deep formations like Haynesville Shales. Experimental
measurements show the strong impact of proppant stress and proppant embedment on reducing fracture conductivity.
In this work, we introduce a new class of smart Expandable Proppants (EP) to remotely control the expanding force and maintain the functionality of injected placed proppants. Our smart proppants are made out of thermoset shape memory polymers which are activated by formations in situ temperature to effectively maintain or even increase fractures width. A fully coupled CFD-DEM model is developed to study the effectiveness of expandable proppants and evaluate fracture conductivity enhancement via different combination and distribution of EP.
In addition, a series of experiments were conducted in a modified API conductivity cell to measure the increase in fracture conductivity. Different conditions of temperature, confining stress, proppant size and concentrations are carried out to verify the optimum conditions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-10242016-154015 |
| Date | 03 November 2016 |
| Creators | Santos, Livio Yang |
| Contributors | Li, Guoqiang, Dahi, Arash, Thompson, Karsten |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-10242016-154015/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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