This post grapples with a complicated, nuanced, and important topic: what do hydraulic fractures look like and how should we model them? Should we use planar fracture models or ‘complex’ hydraulic fracture network models? On June 27, I attended the ARMA Hydraulic Fract...

History matching numerical models can be time consuming due to the non-uniqueness of the solution. Using RTA in conjunction with ResFrac can help direct users to the right combination of parameters to be changing.

There is a very nice article in JPT today about our DFIT Industry Study. Here an update.

The DFIT Industry Study kicked off in January 2018 with six major operators and one service company participating. We have been holding meetings every three months, and the study wi...

Typically, hydraulic fracture simulations predict symmetrical propagation away from the wellbore. For example, the figure below shows a ResFrac simulation of fracturing and production in a 200 ft horizontal stage with 50 ft cluster spacing. For visibility, the axis is...

Multistage hydraulic fracturing in horizontal wells enables economic production from low permeability resources. A variety of parameters needs to be optimized: stage spacing, cluster spacing, well spacing, well landing depth, injection rate, injection volume per stage,...

I was asked an interesting question recently – how does depletion affect a DFIT? Often, DFITs are performed in wells with neighbors that have been producing for months or years. The depletion of the neighboring well may impact the DFIT by changing the stress and pressu...

In this post, I discuss an important new paper, “Sampling a Stimulated Rock Volume: An Eagle Ford Example,” by Raterman et al., which was presented at URTeC in July. This paper is an instant classic (kind of like Game 5 of the World Series last Sunday!).

Raterman et al....

Introduction

Back in February, I was at an SPE DFIT workshop where David Craig (one of the vocal advocates of the ‘holistic’ method of picking fracture closure) said that he would have a paper at the SPE ATCE with field data that directly validates the holistic method a...

In this post, I address a topic that seems esoteric, but it has critical implications for understanding how DFITs respond to closure. In turn, this directly affects how we estimate stress and permeability. The question under investigation: do fractures store and conduc...

“Postclosure” interpretation is used to infer formation permeability from DFIT pressure measurements. As reviewed in previous posts, the goal of a DFIT is to infer formation properties, of which permeability is one of the most important. A plot of pressure versus G-tim...