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A tight-gas reservoir commonly refers to a low-permeability reservoir that mostly produces natural gas. Irrespective of the reservoir rock type (e.g. sandstone, shales, coal seams or volcanics), they all have one thing in common—these reservoirs cannot be produced at economic rates without an effective hydraulic fracturing treatment. In conventional reservoirs, rock flow capacity is usually sufficient to allow for hydrocarbons flow; therefore, hydraulic fracturing is broadly considered as a remedial technique to improve the productivity of suboptimal producing wells. In this study, fracturing was not originally considered in the primary drilling and completion planning phases, which in many cases limited the effectiveness of fracturing treatments because of challenges resulting from the well architecture, trajectory, azimuthal orientation with respect to dominant stress regimes, and other factors. As the importance of unconventional resources for hydrocarbon production has increased dramatically during the past decade and more attention and efforts are focused globally to explore these reserves, the demand for hydraulic fracturing techniques to prove the economic profitability of these resources has in turn tremendously increased. This has created a paradigm shift, as operators are beginning to recognize that they need to drill and complete wells for hydraulic fracturing to maximize the return on their assets. Therefore, hydraulic fracturing has gained an advanced position in the planning phase of unconventional assets. Volcanic formations are one of the rarer rock types with the potential for accumulations of hydrocarbons that can produce economically. This rarity has resulted in a lack of understanding across the industry on the nature of these reservoirs and how to successfully turn them into lucrative assets. Because of the tight nature of these formations, optimal hydraulic fracturing strategies are intrinsically necessary for economic production. Without a thorough and integrated understanding of the petrophysical and geomechanical properties of these formations, it will be difficult to interpret the fracture growth behavior and its inherent effect on fracture flow capacity in the production phase. |
