An Overview of Completion and Stimulation Techniques and Production Trends in Granite Wash Horizontal Wells

Abstract

Horizontal well completions in the Granite Wash formations of the Anadarko basin in Western Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle approximately doubled year on year since 2006. During this period, the evolution of horizontal well completion and stimulation practices coupled with diligent identification and selection of lateral landing in high reservoir quality has resulted in significant production gains. Various techniques utilizing large samples of well production and completion/stimulation parameters are common in high well volume resource plays to determine well performance drivers. Several studies have been done in the Granite Wash, mostly in vertical wells with multiple pay zones co-mingled. Prior studies are isolated to smaller well samples or are focused on a single well completion strategy. This paper investigates two different areas of the Granite Wash consisting of seventy three horizontal wells in Western Oklahoma and one hundred sixty five horizontal wells in the Texas Panhandle completed in 2007 through the end of 2009. The objective is correlating completion and stimulation parameters along with lateral length with production trends. First, an overview of production trends and average probable production in different regions is presented. The second half of the paper evaluates completion and stimulation parameters including but not limited to fluid and proppant pumped per unit length of completed interval, total fluid, total proppants, lateral length, number of frac stages and average proppant concentration.

Evolution of Horizontal Well Hydraulic Fracturing in the Granite Wash – Understanding Well Performance Drivers of a Liquids-Rich Anadarko Basin Formation

“…Horizontal wells with stimulation materials and lateral length data were analyzed using techniques fromThompson et al [7] and Srinivasan et al [2] in which wells are ordered from best to least best 3 month average oil and gas production and compared to lateral length plots with same production order maintained. Normalized production per 1000 feet of lateral is plotted similarly and compared with normalized proppant placed, fracturing fluid utilized, average proppant concentration, and when available the stage lengths and number of stages.…”

“…These algorithms provide an overview of various parameters that drive production such as number of fracturing stages, lateral length, volumes of proppant and fluid pumped etc. Studies have been conducted on horizontal wells with a relatively small database without taking into account reservoir property variation both laterally and vertically [2] . Figure 1 [3] shows a map of the Granite Wash well locations as of November 2010.…”