Abstract
Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques are applied in the unconventional reservoirs to improve the low recovery, which is usually in the range of 2-15%. The enabler for application of these techniques is hydraulic fracturing that increases the reservoir contact in an almost impermeable reservoir. The reservoir is then subjected to various EOR mechanisms, and a majority of such methods involve injection and production sequence. In such a setup, conformance issues often dictate the effectiveness of the development plan. Conformance in injection-production scenarios is largely affected by the orientation of hydraulic fractures. While horizontal wells with longitudinal fractures may provide low risk of water breakthrough, they may also lead to sub-optimal recovery. So, horizontal wells with transverse fractures, although pose a higher risk of conformance, provide an opportunity to boost the recovery.
In our previous work, we introduced the multistage enhanced recovery (MS-ER) techniques that enable face-to-face alignment in horizontal wells with multistage transverse fractures, thus enabling optimal recovery and mitigating the key risk of fracture short-circuiting. This work is a continuation of the MS-ER techniques, where we discuss further refinements in some of the techniques.
