An Alternative BEM Modeling of Transient Pressure Response of Fractured Reservoir by Use of a Semi-Analytical Approach

Semi-analytical modeling is an efficient method to obtain the transient response of fracture network. Since the fracture width is very small compared to the length, most semi-analytical models regard the fracture panel as 1D linear flow with a continuous line source along which the exchange of influx rate is nonuniformly distributed. In contrast, the purpose of this paper is to explicitly represent realistic finite-volume fractures where the flow pattern is two-dimensional and captures the details of the flow exchange between the porous media and fracture. A methodology similar to the boundary element method (BEM) is developed to simulate the transient pressure behavior for discretely and contiously fractured media. Numerous case studies are presented to validate the approach in comparison to full numerical simulation and existing solutions published in the literature. Case studies also demonstrate its capability to simulate different types of fractured medium.