TIGHT GAS RESERVOIRS

MALUGU P JOHN
T/UDOM/2020/05795
What is tight reservoir?
• Tight reservoirs are generally defined as having less than 0.1 milli Darcy
(mD) matrix permeability and less than ten percent matrix porosity.
• Production rates from tight reservoirs are marginal, but these reservoirs
account for a large percentage of the long-term supply of oil and gas.
• Tight gas is natural gas produced from reservoir rocks with such low
permeability that massive hydraulic fracturing is necessary to produce the
well at economic rates. That reservoir is called as the tight gas reservoir.
• Although shales have low permeability and low effective porosity, shale
gas is usually considered separate from tight gas, which is contained most
commonly in sandstone but sometimes in limestone.
• Tight gas is considered unconventional source of natural gas.
• Tight oil is the oil that is found within the reservoir with very low
permeability.
• The oil contained within the reservoir typically will not flow to the
wellbore at economic rate. That reservoir is called as tight oil
reservoir.
• Tight oil cannot produce without assistance from technologically
advanced drilling and completion process.
• Commonly, horizontal drilling coupled with multi-stage fracturing is
used to access these difficult to produce reservoir.
• Tight gas reservoirs are generally gas-saturated with little or no free
water. Special recovery processes and technologies like hydro-
fracturing, steam injection, etc. are used to produce hydrocarbons from
theses reservoirs.
• Tight reservoir rock cores to reveal the nonlinear flow characteristics
of single-phase water and oil in the irreducible water state. Threshold
pressure gradient increases with the decreases of permeability.
• Tight reservoirs are mostly associated with conventional reservoirs,
which could be sandstone, siltstone, limestone, dolomite, sandy
carbonates shale and chalks with significant thickness.
• Tight reservoir sands are continuous and stacked sedimentary layers
charged with hydrocarbons.
• The most common tight sands generally consist of highly altered
primary porosity, with authigenic quartz growth, coupled with
secondary pore developments.
• Many tight formations are extremely complex, producing from
multiple layers with permeability that often enhanced by natural
fracturing. Origin of Fractures are due to folding and faulting, solution
of evaporates, high pore pressures, regional present day stress field
and regional fractures.
• Recovery factor from tight reservoirs globally stand at around just 7-
20%. Recovery is a function of the extent to which fractures extend
from each well.
 Logging in tight reservoir
• Logging is the important process in the petroleum sector.
• Logging is important to find the hydrocarbon in to the reservoir and
find the lithology below the earth surface.
• Factors identified by Logging in tight reservoir
1. Location of the tight reservoir
2. Lithology
3. Natural fracture
4. Permeability
5. Porosity
6. Tightness
• Different type of logs are used in tight reservoir to find its
characteristics
• Types of Logs:
1. SP (spontaneous potential)
2. NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance)
3. Resistivity 4. Neutron porosity and density log
5. Gamma ray log
 Factors to consider for tight reservoir
1. Geologic considerations
• The analysis of any reservoir, including a tight reservoir, should always
begin with a thorough understanding of the geologic characteristics of the
formation. The important geologic parameters for a trend or basin are:
• The structural and tectonic regime
• The regional thermal gradients
• The regional pressure gradients Knowing the stratigraphy in a basin is very
important and can affect:
• Drilling
• Evaluation
• Completion
• Stimulation
Important geologic parameters that should be studied for each
stratigraphic unit are:
• The depositional system
• The genetic facies
• Textural maturity
• Mineralogy
• Diagenetic processes
• Cements
• Reservoir dimensions
• Presence of natural fractures
2. Reservoir continuity
• One of the most difficult parameters to evaluate in tight reservoirs is
the drainage area size and shape of a typical well. In tight reservoirs,
months or years of production are normally required before the
pressure transients are affected by reservoir boundaries or well-to-well
interference. As such, the engineer often has to estimate the drainage
area size and shape for a typical well in order to estimate reserves.
• Knowledge of the depositional system and the effects of diagenesis on
the rock are needed to estimate the drainage area size and shape for a
specific well.
• In blanket, tight gas reservoirs, the average drainage area of a well
largely depends on :
• the number of wells drilled
• the size of the fracture treatments pumped on the wells
• the time frame being considered
• A main factor controlling the continuity of the reservoir is the
depositional system. Generally, reservoir drainage per well is small in
continental deposits and larger in marine deposits. Fluvial systems
tend to be more lenticular. Barrier-strandplain systems tend to be more
blanket and continuous. Most of the more successful tight plays are
those in which the formation is a thick, continuous, marine deposit.
• Normally, a tight reservoir can be described as a layered system.
• In a clastic depositional system, the layers are composed of Sandstone,
Siltstone, Mudstone, Shale.
• In non clastic systems, layers are composed of Limestone, Dolomite,
Possibly halite or anhydrite
• The following data are required to use 3D reservoir and fracture
propagation models to evaluate the formation, design the fracture
treatment, and forecast production rates and ultimate recovery: Gross
pay thickness, Net pay thickness, Permeability, Porosity, Water
saturation, Pressure, In-situ stress, Young’s modulus
• The speed at which pressure transients move through porous media is
a function of the:
• Formation permeability
• Fluid viscosity
• Fluid compressibility
3. Drilling and completion considerations
• The most important part of drilling a well in a tight reservoir is to drill
a gauge hole. A gauge hole is required to obtain an adequate suite of
open hole logs and to obtain an adequate primary cement job.
• In low porosity, shaly reservoirs, the analyses of gamma ray (GR),
spontaneous potential (SP), porosity, and resistivity logs to determine
accurate estimates of shale content, porosity, and water saturation can
be difficult. If the borehole is washed out ("out of gauge"), the log
readings will be affected, and it will be even more difficult to
differentiate the pay from the non-pay portions of the formation
• Formation damage and drilling speed should be a secondary concern.
Some wells are drilled underbalanced to increase the bit penetration
rate or to minimize mud filtrate invasion.
• The completion strategy and stimulation strategy required for a tight
reservoir very much depends on the number of layers of net pay and
the overall economic assessment of the reservoir. In almost every case,
a well in a tight reservoir is not economic to produce unless the
optimum fracture treatment is both designed and pumped into the
formation
• Formation evaluation To properly complete, fracture treat, and
produce a tight reservoir, each layer of the pay zone and the
formations above and below the pay zone must be thoroughly
evaluated. The most important properties that must be known are pay
zone thickness, porosity, water saturation, permeability, pressure, in-
situ stress, and Young’s modulus. The raw data that are used to
estimate values for these important parameters come from:
• Logs • Cores
• Well tests • Drilling records
• Production from offset wells
• Principle types of Tight reservoir
• Tight formation (gas) A tight gas reservoir is one in which the expected
value of permeability to gas flow would be less than 0.1 md.
• Coal bed (methane) Coalbed methane, as its name suggests, is trapped in
coal deposits. It is also known as coal seam gas. Most of the gas is
adsorbed on the surface of the coal, which is an excellent "storage
medium": it can contain two to three times more gas per unit of rock
volume than conventional gas deposits.
• Shales (gas) Shale gas is natural gas that is found trapped within shale
formations
• Carbonate reservoir
• Shale oil Tight oil (also known as shale oil or light tight oil, abbreviated
LTO) is petroleum that consists of light crude oil contained in petroleum-
bearing formations of low permeability, often shale or tight sandstone.
Techniques to produce from tight reservoir
A. Hydraulic fracturing
• Hydraulic fracturing is the most common mechanism to create
channels ( highly conductive path) by breaking the low permeability
rock to increase well productivity.
• Carbonate formations generally have a low permeability and can be
highly fissured In certain carbonate reservoirs fracturing is performed
with acid – acid fracturing.
Why Fracture?
• By-pass near wellbore damage
• Increase well production by changing flow regime from radial to
linear
• Reduce sand production
• Increase access to the reservoir from the well bore.
• Develop uneconomical/ marginal reserves.
• 95% of US and Canada fractures are in tight-gas or unconventional
resource wells
• Effect of Hydraulic Fracture on Flow Regime is shown in the figure
below.
• If properly created, hydraulic fractures can change flow regime from
radial to linear
• Hydraulic fracturing is done in 4 stages.
1. Pre pad or pre flush : pumping of thin fluid ahead of water to
decrease the friction pressure.
• It also cools down the hot formation so that the viscosity of the fluid
which we pumped in second stage do not fall down.
• We inject the drag or friction reducer in low concentration i.e. ½ or ¼
gallon per 1000 gallon of water, which reduces friction pressure by 80
to 85%.
• It initiates fractures.
2. Pad stage of viscous fluid: viscous fluid is pumped in order to
enhance fracture dimensions in terms of height, width and length.
• Polymers are also added in fluid so that it can hold the proppant in
suspension.
3. Proppant laden stage
• solids are added with viscous fluid to make a slurry and pump them to
keep the fractures open which closes due to overburden.
4. Flush stage
After proppants are set in the fractures, by reducing pressure in stages
by choke production commences. We add thin fluids – Vis breakers
which reduces the viscosity of fluids which we have pumped, to flow. •
We want proppants to be in the fractures, not the viscous fluid. So that
fractures do not closes.
B. Horizontal drilling
• The purpose of drilling a horizontal well is to increase the contact
between the reservoir and the wellbore
• Horizontal drilling also has a greater production rate than traditional
vertical drilling because of the greater wellbore length exposed to the
pay zone.
• Wells are drilled vertically to a predetermined depth (typically 1000m
to 3000m below the surface depending on location) above the tight oil
reservoir.
• The well is then “kicked off” (turned) at an increasing angle until it
runs parallel within the reservoir. Once horizontal, the well is drilled to
a selected length which can extend up to 3-4km. This portion of the
well is called the horizontal leg.
• Using horizontal drilling techniques, companies can now drill a
number of wells in different directions from one well pad, which is
much more efficient than having numerous well pads set up to extract
oil.
• This decreases the surface disturbance and saves money with the
reduced costs of well pad setups, replacements and maintenance costs
• Figure below shows the various parts of deviated well from kick off
point to lateral section.