An Integrated Approach for History Matching of Multiscale-Fracture Reservoirs

Naturally or hydraulically fractured reservoirs usually contain fractures at various scales. Among these fractures, large-scale fractures might strongly affect fluid flow, making them essential for production behavior. Areas with densely populated small-scale fractures might also affect the flow capacity of the region and contribute to production. However, because of limited information, locating each small-scale fracture individually is impossible. The coexistence of different fracture scales also constitutes a great challenge for history matching. In this work, an integrated approach is proposed to inverse model multiscale fractures hierarchically using dynamic production data. In the proposed method, a hybrid of an embedded discrete fracture model (EDFM) and a dual-porosity/dual-permeability (DPDP) model is devised to parameterize multiscale fractures. The large-scale fractures are explicitly modeled by EDFM with Hough-transform-based parameterization to maintain their geometrical details. For the area with densely populated small-scale fractures, a truncated Gaussian field is applied to capture its spatial distribution, and then the DPDP model is used to model this fracture area. After the parameterization, an iterative history-matching method is used to inversely model the flow in a fractured reservoir. Several synthetic cases, including one case with single-scale fractures and three cases with multiscale fractures, are designed to test the performance of the proposed approach.