Uncertainty quantification in heterogeneous tight/shale reservoirs from analysis of transient/boundary-dominated production data

Abstract Rate transient analysis (RTA) studies that account for permeability heterogeneity in fractured tight/shale reservoirs are deterministic and do not quantify the uncertainty of estimation. Other studies, that include the uncertainty quantification in production analysis, use relatively simple production-decline correlations that do not consider the induced heterogeneity near the fracture. In this work, we introduced an analytical solution that models production from hydraulically fractured wells with induced heterogeneity. The solution is applicable to both transient and boundary-dominated periods. Our previous solution was only applicable for transient period and thus was not able to predict long-term production from these reservoirs. We integrated Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to our solutions and presented the procedure for quantifying the uncertainty of heterogeneity. The uncertainty of production forecast from these wells was also estimated. This procedure allows us to determine the uncertainty of other parameters such as fracture half-length. The presented approach improves the results by accounting for the heterogeneity and its effect on transient and boundary-dominated production periods and also reduction of the uncertainty of estimations. The results from the synthetic numerical examples verify the reliability of the proposed solutions and procedures. In addition, analysis of field data from Barnett shale gas reservoir reveals the practical applicability of the presented approach for estimating permeability profile and production forecast in multi-fractured tight/shale reservoirs.