Stimulation treatments have been difficult to design and evaluate because of the numerous variables involved. A successful treatment has too long been defined as "one where the treatment was pumped without problems." A successful treatment should be defined as "one that provides the production predicted by the design process." The conditions associated with stimulation results and a method to design an optimum treatment with more accurate, predicted results are presented. The method combines both old and new technology associated with well performance testing (pressure transient testing and production systems analysis), pump-in tests to obtain certain critical variables in situ, and compilation of the obtained data to design an economically optimum stimulation that will provide predicted results. The method is used to optimize the design prior to spending any money for stimulation treatments. This optimization allows important economic decisions to be made and a treatment design that is based on those economics. The method also allows the evaluation of post-treatment results.

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