What Factors Control Shale-Gas Production and Production-Decline Trend in Fractured Systems: A Comprehensive Analysis and Investigation

One of the most-significant practical problems with the optimization of shale-gas-stimulation design is estimating post-fracture production rate, production decline, and ultimate recovery. Without a realistic prediction of the production-decline trend resulting from a given completion and given reservoir properties, it is impossible to evaluate the economic viability of producing natural gas from shale plays. Traditionally, decline-curve analysis (DCA) is commonly used to predict gas production and its decline trend to determine the estimated ultimate recovery (EUR), but its analysis cannot be used to analyze which factors influence the production-decline trend because of a lack of the underlying support of physics, which makes it difficult to guide completion designs or optimize field development. This study presents a unified shale-gas-reservoir model, which incorporates real-gas transport, nanoflow mechanisms, and geomechanics into a fractured-shale system. This model is used to predict shale-gas production under different reservoir scenarios and investigate which factors control its decline trend. The results and analysis presented in the article provide us with a better understanding of gas production and decline mechanisms in a shale-gas well with certain conditions of the reservoir characteristics. More-in-depth knowledge regarding the effects of factors controlling the behavior of the gas production can help us develop more-reliable models to forecast shale-gas-decline trend and ultimate recovery. This article also reveals that some commonly held beliefs may sound reasonable to infer the production-decline trend, but may not be true in a coupled reservoir system in reality.