HyFrac.fun: A 3D Hydraulic Fracturing Simulator on Cloud

TL;DR

HyFrac.fun is a cloud platform that integrates hydraulic fracture propagation and reservoir production simulations, revealing how stress-shadow effects influence fracture geometry and production efficiency, with minimal impact from fluid rheology.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cloud-native platform that unifies fracture propagation and production modeling, enabling comprehensive lifecycle analysis of complex 3D hydraulic fractures.

Findings

Stress-shadow effects significantly influence fracture growth and production.

Switching to shear-thinning fluids has minimal impact on fracture geometry and production.

The platform enables integrated, automated lifecycle simulations of hydraulic fracturing.

Abstract

When multiple hydraulic fractures propagate simultaneously from a horizontal wellbore, elastic stress-shadow interactions generate complex non-planar three-dimensional geometries whose effect on subsequent reservoir drainage has infrequently been quantified, because the propagation and production solvers have historically been incompatible stand-alone tools. This paper presents HyFrac.fun, a cloud-native platform that bridges this gap by exploiting a structural isomorphism between the two SGBEM--FEM governing operator systems. The platform enables automated zero-conversion handoff of the evolved 3D fracture mesh directly to the steady-state Darcy production solver for realizing a fully integrated lifecycle simulation of multi-stage non-planar hydraulic fractures. The lifecycle analysis reveals a double shadow phenomenon: the mechanical stress shadow that suppresses inner-fracture growth during stimulation mirrors a fluid pressure shadow that reduces the inner fracture's drawout rate at small cluster spacing. Critically, switching to a shear-thinning power-law fracturing fluid leaves the fracture trajectories and production rates almost unchanged, demonstrating that stress-shadow-controlled fracture geometry instead of fluid rheology is the primary determinant of long-term production efficiency at equal injection rates. These physics findings are accessible from integrated fracture propagation and production simulations.