Physical Optimization of Acid Fracturing with Unified Fracture Design

Acid fracturing is a reservoir stimulation technique where a fracture is created by injection of acid into the reservoir instead of conventional proppant slurry. The acid causes differential etching on the fracture walls, creating asperities. These asperities hold up the fracture wall, thus contributing to fracture conductivity. Acid fracturing is used mainly to stimulate carbonate rock. This technique has certain advantages over conventional fracturing. There is no proppant used, therefore the risk of screenout is nullified. There are also logistic reasons such as transport of proppant, which might make acid fracturing a viable choice. Theoretically, acid fractures have infinite conductivity in these conduits. This is not always true in practice. In this work, a physical optimization of acid fracturing is performed by utilizing the Unified Fracture Design methodology (UFD, hereforth). Parametric studies are performed to study the dependency of productivity on various factors.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Petroleum Engineering

Grantor

University of Houston

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Ravikumar, Arjun

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lee, William M.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Willam, Kaspar J.
• Myers, Michael T.

• Unified fracture design
• Acid fracturing
• Optimization

Statement dc:rights

• The author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10657/1665

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uh-ir.tdl.org:10657/1665