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THE SPE IMAGE LIBRARY

SPE 8297

Interpretation of Fracturing Pressures 8297 Nolte, Kenneth G., SPE, Amoco Production Co. Smith, Michael B., SPE, Amoco Production Co. SEPTEMBER 1981 Summary This paper presents a basis for interpreting fracture-treating pressures that permits identification of periods of confined-height extension, uncontrolled height growth, and, more importantly, a critical pressure. When a treatment reaches the critical pressure, fracture extension is reduced significantly and a pressure (or screenout) condition or undesired fracture height can follow. Example applications for data from five treatments are presented along with potential explanations for, and implications of, the critical pressure. Introduction This paper is limited to the discussion of hydraulically created fractures that are in the vertical plane. In addition, if these fractures are desired to be deeply penetrating, they must have confined or limited height growth. Therefore, the paper is limited further to fractures having a horizontal penetration appreciably larger than their vertical height. There are two fundamentally different concepts for the propagation of a constant-height vertical fracture that lead to very different results. One concept is that the fracture width is constant across the height of the fracture. This requires the assumption that the formation bed being fractured is independent of the beds above and below - i.e., the beds can slip freely, independent of one another, at their boundaries. This assumption leads to the conclusion that the fluid pressure required to extend the fracture decreases with time. The other concept, presented by Perkins and Kern, assumes that there is no, or negligible, slip of boundaries along the horizontal planes that confine the fracture height. This assumption leads to the conclusion that the fluid pressure required to extend the fracture increases with time. This concept, as refined by Nordgren, predicts that for a Newtonian fluid creating a confined-height fracture at a constant

THE SPE IMAGE LIBRARY injection rate, the wellbore pressure increases proportionally to time raised to an exponent: ..................(1) The larger value is for the assumption of a relatively small fluid loss rate, relative to the injection rate, while the smaller value of the exponent is for a relatively large fluid loss rate. For Eq. 1 and all other cases in this paper, reference to pressure implies pressure above the fracture closure pressure. Fig. 1 shows the wellbore treating pressure, above the in-situ closure pressure, vs. time for three massive treatments. The data shown in this paper were collected by a tubing/annulus wellbore configuration having no packer. For this configuration the treatment can be pumped down the tubing or annulus, with the surface pressure on the static line giving the bottomhole pressure after a correction for hydrostatic head. The closure pressures for the formations were determined by a pump-in/flowback procedure. Briefly, this procedure uses the same tubing/annulus configuration and consists of injecting a volume of fluid at a sufficient rate to initiate or open a fracture in the formation. After the injection, the well is backflowed at an appropriate constant rate (e.g., through a surface choke) that varies for different formations. In the desired range of flowback rates (e.g., one-quarter of the injection rate), a plot of pressure vs. flowback time will exhibit a characteristic reversal of curvature (i.e., increasing rate of decline) when the fracture closes. JPT P. 1767

SPE 8297

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