Temperature effect in the nature fractures reactivation during hydraulic fracturing

ABSTRACT: Hydraulic fracturing is a widely used technique in the petroleum engineering. It is based on the injection of a fluid at high pressure into the well with the intention of creating and propagating multiple fractures in a rock formation to increase well-reservoir connectivity. Furthermore, the presence of natural fractures increases the complexity of the system to characterized and simulated. Modelling the process of induced fracture initiation, propagation and interaction with natural fractures and the effect of the temperature in the system is a very challenged task. Significant progress has been made in the development of complex fracture models to address the needs for more suitable tools than the conventional models. A technique that has been developed to model fracture propagation is the Continuous Approximation of Strong Discontinuities, which introduces a special kinematics, capable of simulating degradation of the material. One way to implement this approximation is to introduce the effects of a very narrow band of localized deformations within the existing finite elements. In this paper was used a finite element procedure that performs numerical analysis of high temperature fluid flow in a deformable porous media in a fully coupled scheme to study the effect of temperature on the generation and reactivation of fractures in the reservoir.