| Hydraulic fracturing is a technique that is widely used in the petroleum industry to enhance production from low permeability oil and gas reservoirs. The design of a hydraulic fracturing treatment is, therefore, an important aspect in petroleum engineering.; The first objective of this research was to develop two- and three-dimensional hydraulic fracturing and proppant transport models using approximate analytical solutions and more rigorous finite difference numerical solutions. The finite difference solutions were formulated to include the capability of using fluid properties as a function of time and temperature, multiple injection rates and multiple types of proppants. The second objective of this research was to validate these models, to make sensitivity analyses on fracture propagation for various reservoir and fluid constraints and to history match the injection rate and injection pressure data from several field examples to determine the shape and dimensions of actual fractures. Results are presented to illustrate how the model can be used to analyze field data.; The contribution of this research to the petroleum industry is the development of computer models to simulate two- and three-dimensional hydraulic fracture propagation and proppant transport. The proppant transport model is a rigorous finite difference simulator that includes the effect of fluid viscosity, proppant density and proppant concentration on proppant transport. All models can be executed with minimum input data, can be run on either a mainframe or a PC computer, and require only moderate CPU time compared to other three-dimensional fracture propagation models. |
