Production Performance in the In-Fill Development of Unconventional Resources

Abstract

Until 2015, North America's unconventional resource market was known to be home to the largest oil shale deposits of economic value. Although the recent commodity price fluctuations have exposed the role of geo-politics, world economies and commodity trading on the life cycle of assets, few field development studies have consider the impact of commodity cycles on the development of in-fill wells. Papers have been presented to demonstrate the impact of vertical fracture connectivity and fracture asymmetry on in-fill well performance (due to delayed in-fill drilling), but little has been done on validation and coupling the impact of depletion, due to production, and hydraulic fracturing (due to in-fill efficiency fracture operations). This paper presents results from the analysis of in-fill drilling on well performance. Production data, fracture treatment data, completion and production timing are analyzed using pressure/ production history matching techniques and compared with results predicted by data driven models (developed to match well performance) with the aim of proposing in-fill development strategies. Analysis of the field production data indicates that timing of in-fill wells (following the parent well) can influence the in-fill production depending on the level of depletion (cumulative fluid produced) and the size/type of fracture treatments pumped. Analysis of raw production data, modeling results from multi-domain model based coupled simulations and high resolution monitoring data also indicates that the order of the in-fill operations (East-West, Zipper, etc.) also has a significant impact on performance. This paper presents a simplistic approach to understand the impact of the quest for operational efficiencies and economic cycles on development strategies.

Examining Three New Methods to Validate Re-fracture Models in Unconventional Reservoirs

“…Previous authors have described multi-domain workflows for field development studies (Narasimhan et al 2015;Cherian et al 2015). Geomechanical data was coupled with Petrophysical analysis to build a 3D fracture model using which fracture pressure history matching was performed on a representative well in the area of interest.…”

“…Tight oil and gas reservoirs typically need to be hydraulically fractured in order to extract the hydrocarbons (Liu et al 2008;Cherian et al 2015). Rigorous characterization of rock properties is essential to designing effective hydraulic fracture treatments (Hamza et al 2015;Hamza, Gu, and Quirein 2016;Narasimhan et al 2016).…”