Characteristic Production Decline Patterns for Shale Gas Wells in Barnett

Abstract

This paper derives characteristic decline patterns for shale gas wells by analyzing historical well production data using decline curve analysis of 14,453 shale gas wells in the Barnett shale play from 2000 to 2014. The Hyperbolic model and the Stretched Exponential model are applied on the well-by-well production data at average aggregate well and individual well levels to derive the characteristic parameters. Both the Hyperbolic curve and the Stretched Exponential curve display a good fit to the data for both the average aggregate and the individual shale gas wells. The Hyperbolic model performs slightly better than the Stretched Exponential model in this study. The first year rate of decline for production of a shale gas well is around 60% and over the first two years is around 73%. There is an increasing trend in initial production for new wells over the last decade. A supposed cut-off production rate of 133 Mcf/d results in the estimated ultimate recoverable resource (URR) of about 1.4-2.7 billion cubic feet and a well life time of 11-29 years, which is in line with other studies.

Optimal planning of artificial lift operations in a shale gas multiwell pad

“…We present five case studies of increasing complexity to analyze the computational effort required to solve the model to optimality. The input data are inferred and adapted from already published works 7,15,22,28 . Tables 2, 3, and 4 present the input data used for all the case studies.…”

How Many Wells? Exploring the Scope of Shale Gas Production for Achieving Gas Self-Sufficiency in Poland

“…In this study, we relied on well-by-well production experience from the USA to explore possible future scenarios for drilling and production in Poland. Several recent studies have assessed typical decline rates, lifetimes, and other parameters for individual gas and oil wells in US shale regions (Duong, 2011;Guo et al, 2016Guo et al, , 2017Middleton et al, 2017;Valko, 2009;Wachtmeister et al, 2017). We used the Barnett region as a base for our analogy since it is one of the oldest shale production regions, with longer time series available.…”

“…We derived three supply scenarios from variable individual well productivity by using three different IP estimates as described in Table 1. Decline curvature parameters D and b are constant in all scenarios and are based on the median of Barnett wells as derived by Guo et al (2017). Well lifetime was set to 30 years in all cases.…”

Matrix gas flow through ‘impermeable’ rocks – shales and tight sandstone

“…This suggests that permeabilities measured by transient flow methods in the laboratory may lead to an over-conservative estimate of the potential for drainage of a gas reservoir in shale, and perhaps help partially to explain the long-term persistence of flows from some shale gas reservoirs (e.g. Guo et al, 2017;Wang, 2017).…”