Fractured carbonate reservoirs are complex systems to characterize and difficult to produce and forecast. Also, fracture networks provide the path for production and the displacement of the injected fluid from the injection to the production wells during the secondary and tertiary stages of production. Therefore, the role of naturally forming fractures needs to be recognized and characterized in their different development stages. This work aims to provide a workflow of fracture characterization and study their influence on production based on comprehensive geoscience, reservoir, drilling, and production data.
The introduced workflow has been implemented for a giant complex fractured carbonate reservoir with a long production history to outline the effect of fracture types on production. The available FMI logs identified four open fracture sets based on their aperture size, including major, medium-small, and hairy open fractures. The relationship between fracture characteristics and production data was studied based on the generated faults, curvature, stress, mud loss data, and productivity index maps. A good agreement was found between the fracture model and the generated maps. Finally, the resulting reservoir model based on the generated DFN model indicated the importance of fracture typing and modeling on production