Increasing the efficiency of completions in horizontal wells is an important concern in the oil and gas industry. To decrease the number of fracturing stages per well, it is common practice to use multiple clusters per stage. This is done with the hope that most of the clusters in the stage will be effectively stimulated. Diagnostic evidence, however, suggests that in many cases, only one or two out of four or five clusters in a stage are effectively stimulated.

In this paper, strategies to maximize the number of effectively stimulated perforation clusters are discussed. A fully 3D poroelastic model that simulates the propagation of nonplanar fractures in heterogeneous media is developed and used to model the propagation of multiple competing fractures. A parametric study is first conducted to demonstrate how important fracture-design variables, such as limited-entry perforations and cluster spacing, and formation parameters, such as permeability and lateral and vertical heterogeneity, affect the growth of competing fractures. The effect of stress shadowing caused by both mechanical and poroelastic effects is accounted for.

3D numerical simulations have been performed to show the effect of some operational and reservoir parameters on simultaneous-competitive-fracture propagation. It was found that an increase in stage spacing decreases the stress interference between propagating fractures and increases the number of propagating fractures in a stage. It was also found that an increase in reservoir permeability can decrease the stress interference between propagating fractures because of poroelastic-stress changes. A modest (approximately 25%) variability in reservoir mechanical properties along the wellbore is shown to be enough to alter the number of fractures created in a hydraulic-fracturing stage and mask the effects of stress shadowing. Interstage fracture simulations show post-shut-in fracture extension induced by stress interference from adjacent propagating fractures. The effect of poroelasticity is highlighted for infill-well-fracture design, and preferential fracture propagation toward depleted regions is clearly observed in multiwell-pad-fracture simulations.

The results in this paper attempt to provide practitioners with a better understanding of multicluster-fracturing dynamics. On the basis of these findings, recommendations are made on how best to design fracture treatments that will lead to the successful placement of fluid and proppant in a single fracture, and result in a set of fractures that are competing for growth. The ability to successfully stimulate all perforation clusters is shown to be a function of key fracture-design parameters.