Flowback Fracture Closure: A Key Factor for Estimating Effective Pore Volume
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary The importance of evaluating well productivity after hydraulic fracturing cannot be overemphasized. This has necessitated the improvement in the quality of rate and pressure measurements during flowback of multistage-fractured wells. Similarly, there have been corresponding improvements in the ability of existing transient models to interpret multiphase flowback data. However, the complexity of these models introduces high uncertainty in the estimates of resulting parameters, such as fracture pore volume (PV), half-length, and permeability. This paper proposes a two-phase tank model for reducing parameter uncertainty and estimating fracture PV independent of fracture geometry. This study starts by use of rate-normalized-pressure (RNP) plots to observe changes in fluid-flow mechanisms from multistage-fractured wells. The fracture “pressure-supercharge” observations form the basis for developing the proposed two-phase tank model. This model is a linear relationship between RNP and time, useful for interpreting flowback data in wells that show pseudosteady-state behavior (unit slope on log-log RNP plots). The linear relationship is implemented on a simple Monte Carlo spreadsheet. This is then used to estimate and conduct uncertainty analysis on effective fracture PV by use of probabilistic distributions of average fracture compressibility and gas/water saturations. Also, the proposed model investigates the contributions of various drive mechanisms during flowback (fracture closure, gas expansion, and water depletion) by use of quantitative drive indices similar to those used in conventional reservoir engineering. Application of the proposed tank model to flowback data from 15 shale-gas and tight-oil wells estimates the effective fracture PV and initial average gas saturation in the active fracture network. The results show that fracture-PV estimation is most sensitive to fracture closure compared with gas expansion and water depletion, making fracture closure the primary drive mechanism during early-flowback periods. Also, the initial average gas saturation for all wells is less than 20%. The parameters estimated from the proposed model could be used as input guides for more-complex studies (such as discrete-fracture-network modeling and transient-flowback simulation). This reduces the number of unknown parameters and uncertainty in output results from complex models.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it