| Abstract: | Hydraulic fracturing involves the initiation and propagation of fractures in rock formations by the injection of pressurized fluid. The largest use of hydraulic fracturing is in enhancing oil and gas production. Tiltmeters are sometimes used in the process to monitor the generated fracture geometry by measuring the fracture‐induced deformations. Fracture growth parameters obtained from tiltmeter mapping can be used to study the effectiveness of such stimulations. In this work, we present a novel scheme that uses the ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) to assimilate tiltmeter data using a simple process model to describe the evolution of fracture growth parameters, and an observation model that maps the fracture geometry with the observed tilt. The forward observation model is based on the analytical solution for computing the displacements and tilts due to a point source displacement discontinuity in an elastic half‐space developed by Okada 1 . The displacement and tilts for any given fracture geometry are then obtained by numerical integration of this solution, by considering multiple point sources to be located at the quadrature points. The proposed method is validated using synthetic data sets generated from polygon and elliptical shaped fracture geometries. Finally, real data from a field site, where asymmetry was measured from the intersections of the hydraulic fracture with offset boreholes, have been analyzed. Preliminary results show that, in addition to extracting the fracture dip, orientation, and volume, the procedure is able to satisfactorily predict fracture growth parameters when the fracture is relatively close to the tiltmeter array and provides some insight into the development of asymmetry when the measurements are relatively far from the fracture plane. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
