Optimizing Treatment Parameters for Enhanced Hydrocarbon Production by Hydraulic Fracturing

novel scheme is presented in this paper for hydraulic fracturing design, which integrates reservoir properties, operational limitations, fracture growth control requirements, reservoir production behaviour, and investment-return cash flow behaviour in deciding on the optimum values of various treatment parameters. The capability and robustness of the optimization scheme is demonstrated by applications to a tight gas reservoir for which various designs are obtained: maximum NPV design, maximum production design, a target production design, and a compromised design. Optimum designs are found to be different for different objective functions. It is demonstrated that maximization of NPV, or production, involves a high treatment cost, which can be minimized further by solving a combined objective function, but at the expense of some NPV or production. By trade-off analysis between production/NPV and treatment cost, 44% of treatment cost saving is indicated at the expense of only a 12% sacrifice in production/NPV. Various other design issues are investigated by sensitivity analyses.