Development of a full 3D numerical model to investigate the hydraulic fracture propagation under the impact of orthogonal natural fractures

Although hydraulic fracturing has been massively studied and applied as a key technique to enhance the gas production from tight formations, some problems and uncertainties exist to accurately predict and analyze the fracture behavior in complex reservoirs, especially in the naturally fractured reservoirs like shale reservoirs. This paper presents a full 3D numerical model (FLAC3D) to study hydraulic fracturing behavior under the impact of preexisting orthogonal natural fractures. In this numerical model, the hydraulic fracture propagation direction is assumed perpendicular to the minimum principal stress and activated only by tensile failure, whereas the preexisting natural fractures can be activated by tensile or shear failure or a combination of them, and only tensile failure can open the natural fracture as well. The newly developed model was used to study the impact of preexisting orthogonal natural fractures on hydraulic fracturing behavior, based on a multistage hydraulic fracturing operation in a naturally fractured reservoir from the Barnett Shale formation, northwest of Texas in USA. In this multistage operation, two more representative stages, i.e., stage 1 with a relatively large horizontal stress anisotropy of 3.3 MPa and stage 4 with a comparatively small one of 1.3 MPa, were selected to conduct the simulation. Based on the numerical results, one can observe that the interaction between hydraulic and natural fracture is driven mainly by induced stress around fracture tip. Besides, the horizontal stress anisotropy plays a key role in opening the natural fracture. Thus, no significant opened fracture is activated on natural fracture in stage 1, while in stage 4 an opened fracture invades to about 90 m into the first natural fracture. Conversely, the hydraulic fracture length in stage 1 is much longer than in stage 4, as some fluid volume is stored in the opened natural fracture in stage 4. In this work, the shear failure on natural fractures is treated as the main factor for inducing the seismic events. And the simulated seismic events, i.e., shear failure on natural fractures, are very comparable with the measured seismic events.