Simulating ‘Fractal Fracture Swarms’ in a General-Purpose Reservoir Simulator

This blog post describes a new capability in ResFrac to capture the effect of ‘fracture swarms’ on production decline trends. Based on work from Acuna (2020), the idea is that variable spacing between fractures causes a gradual onset of production interference. Fractures in a swarm may be numerous and tightly spaced,  so rather than representing each individual crack in the model, we treat each swarm as a single crack and use a numerical technique to capture their effects. In ResFrac, this capability is useful because it provides another mechanism for explaining (and matching) production drawdown trends. For further details, refer to Section 19.10 from McClure et al. (2022).