Completion Effects on Diagnosing Multistage Fracture Treatments with Distributed Temperature Sensing

Distributed temperature sensing (DTS) is a valuable tool to diagnose multistage hydraulic fracture treatments. When a stage interval is shut-in, the clusters which take more fluid during pumping warm up more slowly. Therefore, the fluid volume injected into each cluster can be quantitatively interpreted by numerical inversion of the warm-back temperature behavior. This general concept assumes that the different warm-back behavior is controlled by only the injected fluid volume, however, recent observations of DTS data indicate that completion configurations significantly influence the warm-back behavior. This paper investigates the completion effects on the DTS interpretation. In ideal conditions, when a stage is fractured, the upstream stage intervals should show an almost uniform temperature that is close to the injected fluid temperature. This is due to the high fluid velocity of injected fluid in the wellbore, and the upstream intervals have not been perforated (non-communicating intervals). Thus, the only heat transfer is heat conduction between the wellbore fluid and the surrounding reservoir. But the field DTS data show considerably irregular variations in temperature along the upstream stage intervals. These variations are caused by the completion effects. The non-uniform temperature profile is caused by different heat transfer behavior induced by completion hardware along the production casing string such as joints, clamps, and blast protectors, and by the sensing cable location in the cement, as well as the cement quality. Since the heat transfer behavior impacts the warm-back behavior as well as the temperature profile, the completion effects need to be considered in DTS interpretation. A method of DTS interpretation considering the completion effects to diagnose multistage fracture treatments was developed. Since the heat transfer between a wellbore and a reservoir depends on the overall heat transfer coefficient describing heat conduction through the completion in a forward model, this parameter needs to be tuned along the entire wellbore. To calibrate the completion effect, the temperature inversion is conducted using the temperature measured at a stage interval that is upstream of a stage interval currently being treated. Since the interpreted stage interval is not perforated at that time, the thermal behavior at the non-communicating interval is governed by only the heat conduction through the completion environment. Once the effective values of the overall heat transfer coefficient are estimated along the interpreted stage interval, they can be assumed to be constant physical parameters. Then, the fluid volume distribution is interpreted by using the effective overall heat transfer coefficient profile along each interval. The interpretation method developed in this study was demonstrated using field data, and it was concluded that the new DTS interpretation method provides more accurate diagnosis of fracture treatments.