Title: Hydraulic fracturing electromagnetic monitoring: Dynamic modeling, electrical anisotropy scenarios and its relation to microseismic

Abstract

While the energy transition is real and active, the hydrocarbon sector will continue to be major energy sources for the foreseeable future. In consequence, to reduce risks in hydraulic fracturing operations and to study its interaction with geology, it is very important to monitor the evolution of the fracking. It was developed a simulation of the electromagnetic (EM) response and its joint interpretation with microseismic monitoring simulation during hydraulic fracturing in an unconventional reservoir. A multiphysics workflow is presented, using a criterion based on a breakdown pressure to generate and propagate the fracking and its associated pressure, saturation, electric field, magnetic field, electrical current and electrical resistivity maps. A second step of this study comprises the simulation of the EM response to different electrical anisotropic scenarios and transmitter to receiver configurations. The results indicate: first, the EM response might be sensitive enough to be monitored and the magnetic field correlates better with the saturation distribution than the electric field, yielding additional information to determine the stimulated reservoir volume. Second, in an anisotropic resistive scenario, the magnetic field is the most sensitive field when discriminating different types of anisotropy for all receiver positions; in both stratified and fractured medium the vertical electric field have higher total amplitudes inside the layer whereas the magnetic field in the top and inside it, and the horizontal electric field does in the top and above it; independently of the symmetry, the horizontal electric field is one order of magnitude higher than the vertical electric field above the anisotropic layer and this relation changes inside the layer. Finally, in a horizontal well hydraulically fractured, the relative percent difference of the vertical electric field is higher than the other fields, but this relation can change when moving to other geometries.

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