Numerical Simulations of Geomechanical Deformation, Fluid Flow and Reactive Transport in Shale Rough-Walled Microfractures

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive simulation framework combining geomechanical deformation, fluid flow, and reactive transport in shale microfractures to understand permeability evolution during hydraulic fracturing, validated against experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated simulation approach for shale microfractures using fractional Brownian motion, laser profilometry, and OpenFOAM, with calibration against laboratory experiments.

Findings

Permeability increased by 47% after reactive transport simulations.

Calibration reduced simulation errors to below 4%.

Simulations effectively replicate experimental permeability measurements.

Abstract

Improving hydrocarbon production with hydraulic fracturing from unconventional reservoirs requires investigating transport phenomena at the single fracture level. In this study, we simulated geomechanical deformation, fluid flow, and reactive transport to understand the effect of hydraulic fracturing treatment on permeability evolution in shale rough-walled fractures. Using concepts of fractional Brownian motion and surface roughness characterizations with laser profilometer, we first generated three rough-walled microfractures consistent with three laboratory experiments (i.e., E4, E5 and E6). After that, the generated microfractures were subjected to a confining pressure in accord with experimental conditions, and geomechanical deformation was simulated. We used the OpenFOAM software package to simulate the fluid flow and permeability. By comparing the simulated permeability values with the experimentally measured ones we found relative errors equal to 28, 15 and 200% respectively for the experiments E4, E5 and E6. After calibration, however, the relative error dropped below 4%. We next simulated the reactive transport using the GeoChemFOAM solver and investigated permeability evolution in the deformed microfractures. We found that after 10 hrs of reactive transport simulations, permeability increased by 47%, on average, in all cases studied here.