Abstract

Distributed vibration sensing has provided a new measurement technique for monitoring hydraulic fracture treatments. We demonstrate that successful existing approaches that integrate pumping parameters and microseismic observations with complex fracture simulation and 3D mechanical earth modelling can be extended to incorporate distributed strain, vibration and flow allocation providing a highly constrained interpretation.

In a monitoring well, where we deploy a hybrid borehole geophone array of 3C geophones for accurate microseismic events mapping, we additionally recover a signal related to static strain from the lowest vibration frequencies of the fibre. From this hybrid cable composed of fiber interconnects and 3C geophones, we may recover extended-aperture information (i) to supplement the geophone-acquired data at microseismic frequencies, (ii) to better constrain hypocenter determination and associated characteristics (e.g., source parameters, attributes, rock failure mechanisms). Furthermore, deploying a fiber within the treatment well, we can recover the relative flow split between the perforation clusters, obtain the bottom hole pressure using the attenuation of the pump harmonics, etc. We integrate these new measurements into the existing geomechanical modelling approach to stimulation interpretation.

We present an example of job planning where synthetic fiber vibrations at the full frequency range and pump data as well as geophone responses are created based on geomechanical and geophysical simulation.

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