Fracture Traversing Optimization Design for Longitudinally Strongly Heterogeneous Continental Shale in the Fuxing Area

Abstract The continental shale in the Dongyuemiao formation of the Fuxing area have strong longitudinal heterogeneity with limestone interlayers, which inhibits hydraulic fracture traversing behaviors in the multi-layer heterogeneous shale and leads to multi-cluster fracturing challenges in this area. To improve the traversing effectiveness of hydraulic fractures, in this paper, a multi-cluster fracture traversing model is established based on the PFM approach, with the multi-layer fine geo-mechanical model of X-1 well, a study on the influence of continental shale geological and engineering parameters on the fracture traversing behavior has been conducted. The results show that limestone interlayers with high geo-stress in the continental shale formation limit the multi-cluster fracture traversing, and the layers between layers can arrest hydraulic fractures. Affected by the interlayers, the average fracture height of multi-cluster fracture decreased obviously, the Pay zone 2 is a more reasonable perforation position for multi-cluster fracture initiation and penetration. The perforation parameters with fewer cluster numbers and larger cluster spacing are more conducive to stimulating more layers longitudinally.