Back to the Future: Shale 2.0 - Returning Back to Engineering and Modelling Hydraulic Fractures in Unconventionals With New Seismic to Stimulation Workflows

Abstract

Stimulating Shale Gas Wells has become a mundane activity with very little or no engineering. The industry has focused heavily on reducing costs and increasing efficiencies of operations that there is seldom any time for engineering. The lack of any horizontal logging information, assumptions that rock quality does not change have led to excel driven spreadsheets doing glorified mass balances which are considered as the fracture designs of today. In addition to this the same fracture treatment is pumped stage after stage well after well. Needless to say the industry's lack of ability to model these complex fractures has also contributed to the exercise of moving away from fundamental fracture design. This trend has resulted in productivities of wells being all over the place that mostly are unexplained. The industry is beginning to realize that a significant % of the wells drilled in unconventionals are not profitable.Refracturing is also gaining prominence because of a single important factor that primary initial completions are ineffective. Shale 2.0 is all about integrating seismic to stimulation information to provide better answers and ultimately better productivity via simple measurements in the lateral. These measurements are ultimately used to engineer the completion, design and understand the science behind fracturing than just merely pumping the job. This paper details the planning, design and evaluation processes in the application of a new workflow called the Unconventional Reservoir Optimized Completion workflow. This revolutionary Seismic to Stimulation workflow demonstrates with examples how we have migrated, a dominant well centric process to a reservoir centric process. A significant step change in fracture modelling has been applied using unconventional fracture models which have the ability to model complex fractures using discrete fracture networks. These models can be validated using microseismic and when calibrated with production can become a powerful prediction tool. Experiences and lessons learned in the Canadian Montney will be presented.

Species composition and catch of sharks, rays and skates in Ba Ria - Vung Tau and Binh Thuan provinces of Vietnam

“…With the development of new tools for fracture characterization using seismic data, seismic-driven reservoir simulation and monitoring are becoming the standard for improving reservoir description (Ouenes et al 2004;Ramanathan et al 2014). The understanding of geomechanics and seismology have provided a tool for modeling the fracture geometry and integration of the seismic and stimulation data in the reservoir modeling and production forecasting.…”

Genesis and Accumulation Mechanism of Low-Rank CBM: A Case Study in the Jiergalangtu Block of Erlian Basin, Northern China

“…Research on coalbed methane (CBM) genesis is an important part of the CBM accumulation mechanism. , CBM genesis can be divided into organic, inorganic, and mixed gas, among which organic gas includes primary biological gas, secondary biological gas, thermal degradation gas, and thermal cracking gas. , Based on geochemical indicators including gas composition and hydrocarbon isotopes and classical natural gas identification charts, biological gas has been identified in medium and low-rank coal bearing basins such as Powder River Basin, San Juan Basin, and Black Warrior Basin in the United States, Surat Basin in Australia, and Junggar Basin, Erlian Basin, Hailaer Basin, and Ordos Basin in China. − As a key field of CBM exploration and development in China, low-rank CBM has abundant resources but low gas content and low development degree. However, biological gas provides the main gas source supplement, which is expected to lay the resource foundation for China’s low-rank CBM to reserve growth and production addition. − …”