Optimum Well Completion Strategies in Tight Oil Reservoirs

Abstract

Hydraulic fracture design and performance optimization has been studied extensively. Lean manufacturing strategies for the intensive fracturing operations requires completion optimization by careful understanding of marginal benefits that additional fracture stages will bring to the bottom line.This study presents the results of a tight oil reservoir analogy of the Bakken shale using a fully coupled reservoir and surface-network multiphase simulation orchestrated by an automated workflow to run multiple technical scenarios to understand the incremental economic value of adding additional fractures to the standard 20-fracture well design. Our effort included the use of assisted generation of grid refinements to estimate oil recovery in a multiple-fracture horizontal well.This study demonstrates that an increasing number of fractures will not always improve the short-term economics. Comparing 30-vs 60-fracture cases to low-permeability cases (k=0.005 and 0.05 md) indicates that NPV can be increased by USD 0.8 to 2.2 million-97 to 110%), whereas return on capital invested (ROCE) was improved by 3-4%. The methodology and the results of this study can confidently be used to advance the understanding of the role of fracture geometry and spacing to enhance an operator's optimum completion design.

Optimizing the Production from a Multizone Well by Selecting Appropriate Completion for a Well of Tal Block Pakistan

“…"Intelligent well completion" contains inflow control devices and permanent downhole gauges [4]. Hydraulic fracture design and performance optimization were used for tight oil reservoirs to improve the permeability of the reservoir and the designed well completion improved the performance in case of hydraulic fracture [5]. The general idea of the design method utilizes a tubular design, supported by software, which offered an analytical method for reviewing tubing loads, design reliability and buckling behavior under composite mechanical, fluid pressure and thermal loading condition [6].…”

“…The "multilayer-dp loss in wellbore" reservoir model was used to generate the IPR curves for the multizone well. Equation(5) shows the total pressure drops in wellbore in the case of a multilayer well:∆P T = ∆P HH + ∆P f…”