Abstract
Fracture spacing is an important concept for characterizing flow properties of naturally fractured reservoirs, since the main function of fractures that separate matrix blocks is transporting fluids through long distances; however, the estimation of fracture spacing presents some difficulties mainly due to the fact that fractures occur at different scales, going from microfractures in thin sections and minifractures in cores, up to macrofractures in geological outcrops. The scale of interest in this work is that used in reservoir simulation, which is of the order of feet or meters.
This article is based on the ideas developed in a previous paper, where a procedure to locate fractures is presented. That procedure, which makes use of resistivity data obtained through well logging, visualizes the fractures as highly conducting channels within a low conductivity medium (the rock matrix). By using a special way of data processing, it is possible to filter out data that are not associated with fractures, keeping only those data related to fractures. In this way, fracture spacing can easily be estimated. However, that procedure exhibits some uncertainties which must be overcome to make it a more reliable one.
In this work, a study is made to search for an improved procedure to estimate fracture spacing. For this purpose, fractures are considered at two scales: local scale which includes micro- and minifractures present in matrix blocks, and at reservoir scale which refers to fractures separating matrix blocks. These latter fractures, called principal fractures, constitute the main fracture network, and are the subject matter of this work.
Conductivity studies reveal that local scale fractures have a frequency distribution quite different from that of principal fractures. As it will be seen below, this fact facilitates establishing a procedure for estimating fracture spacing without uncertainties.
To make the ideas clear, an application to a carbonate reservoir is presented. The results obtained show that the improved procedure is a simple, reliable, and practical tool for establishing the distribution of fractures along a well, from which fracture spacing can be inferred.
