Unconventional reservoirs have characteristics that differ from traditional conventional reservoirs. The productivity profile of an unconventional well can be significantly different from a conventional well, in that the production rate declines faster in an unconventional well. Therefore, properly planned well operations are crucial to optimize costs and production from these shale assets. This includes understanding the reservoir physics, planning optimal well spacing, improving well performance from completions, and simulating refracturing effects on well production. This paper presents a new multidisciplinary method to help improve field performance and productivity in unconventional reservoirs. A multidisciplinary approach is necessary for economical and successful operations in unconventional reservoirs. In unconventional fields, wells are drilled quickly; therefore, rapid decision-making is necessary. Currently, fracture modeling is performed using either fine local grid refinements or dual-porosity dual-permeability models, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming. This paper presents a new approach that uses multiple shale-specific features and unstructured models, which allows users to specify discrete natural fracture networks (NFNs) and hydraulic fractures with arbitrary orientations connected to practical well trajectories. The automated gridding technique significantly simplifies the workflow, thus allowing users to focus on addressing issues in the engineering space by streamlining the setting up of complex reservoir simulation models. The approach is applicable to black oil and compositional models of all fluid types. Using parallel capability, performance can be enhanced severalfold. The new approach helps enable modeling of multiple scenarios by modifying parameters easily; thereby, results are readily available to help operators plan optimal well and fracture spacing and length. This paper highlights how well productivity can be improved by optimizing well placement and incorporating the effect of NFNs and hydraulic fractures.

Efficiently managing the performance of sizeable onshore assets can be challenging, particularly in the absence of well-defined processes and technology to help organize people and data. This often leads to suboptimal processes, ineffective use of resources and time, and missed opportunities. Significant variations in producing reservoirs, artificial lift types, storage and processing facility capacity, data quality and availability, and even manpower can create varied operations and operational issues between areas (Farid et al. 2007). To help mitigate these challenges, an independent oil company and a service company collaborated on an integrated operations center (IOC) analytics dashboard called the operations management dashboard (OMD). The independent oil company produces and operates in US onshore assets, which necessitates personnel working under complex operating conditions, using multiple applications, and processing data that are fragmented across these applications. The OMD integrated 17 different data sources from various areas, implemented multiple engineering logic calculations, and created intelligent real-time alarms to identify specific operational issues and facilitate asset management. This integration was performed on a single platform. The OMD leveraged solution capabilities range from displaying information from multiple real-time and historical data sources available across the field to streamlining business processes. This helps enhance field staff communications and support the company's management by exception philosophy, focusing on cases that deviate from the norm. The OMD was deployed in one of the independent operator's onshore assets that included 1,000+ tank batteries, 7,000+ wells, and 20+ fields. The OMD automated processes helped reduce errors, resulting in less downtime and associated operational expenditure (OPEX). The OMD also standardized data analysis by allowing access to both historical and real-time data in a single workflow. Additional benefits were improved tank logistics resulting from tank level monitoring and timely and effective communication resulting from displayed work orders and comments between field and office personnel. Overall, the OMD facilitated access to consistent and in-context information, which was necessary for accurate and timely decision-making. The dashboard's easy configuration, alerting functionality with the capability of defining meaningful and complex real-time alarms, and automated processes combined with easy-to-analyze visualizations proved valuable and resulted in enhanced decision-making. By defining alarms and automating processes, the OMD can help optimize injection gas rates during gas lift operations, identify mechanical lift issues, schedule field maintenance or inspections, and recognize production anomalies. The OMD can help quickly identify operational issues and production optimization opportunities. Additionally, it is expected to reduce downtime by 25% and decrease OPEX by 25%.