Development of Powder and Fiber Temporary Plugging Agent System to Improve Fracture Complexity in Slickwater Fracturing

Increasing fracture complexity by temporary plugging agent (TPA) in slickwater fracturing is getting great attention due to the huge difference with conventional fracturing. A powder and fiber TPA system was developed for narrow and long fractures in slickwater fracturing. Additives were optimized to improve the performances in both near wellbore and far field applications for unconventional reservoir developments. Three different powder and fiber systems with similar size were evaluated. For all the three systems, blocking efficiencies increased with injection flow rates. Weight ratio of 4:1 between powder and fiber showed much higher blocking efficiency than that with less fiber component. Samples S1 and S2 showed better performances than sample S3. The dispersibility of powders and fibers in slickwater was found critical to its plugging performance by a cross-sample test. Accordingly, two additives were developed to adjust the dispersibility of TPAs for improved performances. One additive improved migration ability of TPA system at high flow rate and plugging ability at low flow rate, which helped the TPAs flow through high flow rate near wellbore region to plug fractures in deep position. The other one was developed for near wellbore applications with enhanced plugging performance at both high and low flow rate regions. This work provides some insights of powder and fiber types TPAs to increase stimulated reservoir volumes for unconventional reservoir developments.