The Eagle Ford Shale, as one of the most active unconventional reservoirs in the US, began heavy development in 2009. One of the attractive aspects of the Eagle Ford, which has heightened interest and helped to accelerate development, is substantial liquids production, along with solution gas. However the resultant multiphase fluid production, along with reservoir heterogeneity that is typical of most unconventional reservoirs, adds complexity and risk to development, especially for completions.One technique that has the potential for reducing risk is learning from historical completion trends. Even though the Eagle Ford play is quite new, more than 4,000 horizontal wells have been drilled and all have been hydraulically fractured. The resultant large and growing data resource invites data mining to uncover trends and insights.The ground work for this case study was laid first in SPE 149258 (2011) and then in SPE 158501 (2012). This last paper summarized production, completion techniques and hydraulic fracturing stages performed in 57 Eagle Ford wells. Since the previous papers, many new wells have been completed, considerably expanding the data available for analysis. Completion volumes, well architecture and reservoir character are analyzed. The entire data set is mapped in an effort to understand anomalies and trends. As the successful development of this reservoir has relied in the combination of horizontal drilling, multistage completions and hydraulic fracturing, the results should be valuable for understanding and optimizing completions in the Eagle Ford and similar shales.
The success of the Barnett shale helped to revitalize the oil and gas industry in the United States, and sparked a wave of shale development programs. At the same time, it has caused practitioners to rethink how, or even if, we can apply certain theories and technologies developed and implemented in conventional reservoirs to unconventional reservoirs. One fundamental difference in unconventional reservoirs is several orders of magnitude lower rock matrix permeability, largely requiring stimulation for economic development.Re-completion/fracturing in shale reservoirs is a means to increase production by accessing reserves beyond the volume achieved from initial completions. Re-fracturing may also be applied to wells with inefficient initial completions, less-thanoptimum designs or executions, and in depleted wells in which it is possible to treat previously un-stimulated rock volume.We performed this study to discover how production is impacted by recompletion and re-fracturing. By studying specific treatment and production data sets in the Barnett, we searched for new insights about how shale plays should be developed. In this work, we extracted about 200 re-fractured or re-completed wells with treatment information and production data in the Barnett Shale play from a service company's database and a public well database. In this analysis, we took into account treatment data in both initial and refracturing, and evaluated their impact on long-term recovery. Further, we considered other available data in this investigation.In order to identify hidden, potentially predictive information in the data set, exploratory data analysis, univariate and multivariate/ cluster analysis techniques were applied using statistical analysis software such as SAS, combined with Geographic Information System (GIS) software.The paper is organized mainly in two parts. The first part is a data mining study on production and treatment data to discover certain treatment parameters controlling production for both initial completion and refracturing; in the second part, we interpret those observation and findings from perspective of mechanism.
The Eagle Ford Shale, as one of the most active unconventional reservoirs in the US, began heavy development in 2009. One of the attractive aspects of the Eagle Ford, which has heightened interest and helped to accelerate development, is substantial liquids production, along with solution gas. But the resultant multiphase fluid production, along with reservoir heterogeneity, typical of most unconventional reservoirs, adds complexity and risk to development, especially for the completion. One technique that has the potential for reducing risk is learning from historical completion trends. Even though the Eagle Ford play is quite new, more than 3,000 horizontal wells have been drilled and all have been hydraulically fractured. The resultant large and growing data resource invites data mining to uncover trends and insights. The ground work was laid in SPE 149258, which summarized 1,082 fracturing stages in 80 Eagle Ford well. This paper extends that analysis to more than 3,000 Eagle Ford fracturing stages in more than 200 wells. Metrics of completion types, volumes, and efficiencies are analyzed. In addition, the analysis is extended to production data and chemical fracturing additives. The entire data set is mapped in an effort to understand anomalies and trends. As the successful development of this reservoir has relied in the combination of horizontal drilling, multistage completions and hydraulic fracturing, the results should be valuable for understanding and optimizing completions in the Eagle Ford and similar shales.
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