Descriptive Data Analytics for the Stimulation, Completion Activities, and Wells' Productivity in the Marcellus Shale Play

Abstract

Drilling, completion, and stimulation designs have changed over time as a result of the oil and gas industry's ongoing efforts to increase well productivity. Over the last five years hydraulic fracturing treatments, represented by the volume of pumped water and the amount of proppant utilized, have increased significantly, along with the lengths of horizontal wells. This work represents a large-scale descriptive analysis study to illustrate the trends and the range of completion, stimulation and production parameters in the Marcellus Shale play of the Appalachian Basin between 2012 and the last quarter of 2017 (2012-2018). A database was created by combing stimulation fluids and proppant data from the FracFocus 3.0 chemical registry, with completion and production data from the DrillingInfo database. More than 2000 Marcellus Shale wells were utilized in this study. The data were processed and cleaned from outliers. Box plots and distribution bar charts are presented for most of the parameters in this study, to show the range in values for each parameter and its frequency of use. The stimulation parameters were normalized to perforated lateral length in order to compare productivity between the wells. Trends identified in this study show how operators in the Marcellus have increased the use of hybrid fracturing fluids, in addition to increasing water and proppant volumes over time. The work also illustrates the point at which increasing fracture treatment volumes no longer increases production rate. This paper demonstrates the utility of integrating publicly available databases to examine well completion trends in the Marcellus. The work also provides a summary of well response as a function of treatment volume over the five year study period.

Meeting Name

SPE/AAPG/SEG Asia Pacific Unconventional Resources Technology Conference 2019, APUR 2019 (2019: Nov. 18-19, Brisbane, Australia)

Department(s)

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering

Research Center/Lab(s)

Center for Research in Energy and Environment (CREE)

Keywords and Phrases

Data Analytics; Database systems; Fracturing fluids; Gas industry; Horizontal wells; Infill drilling; Natural gas well completion; Oil shale; Oil well drilling; Productivity; Proppants; Resource valuation; Shale; Well stimulation, Descriptive analysis; Fracture treatment; Hydraulic fracturing treatments; Oil and Gas Industry; Production parameters; Stimulation design; Stimulation parameters; Well productivity, Oil well completion

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

978-161399673-7

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2019 Unconventional Resources Technology Conference (URTEC), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Nov 2019

Link to Full Text

Share

 
COinS