Abstract
Horizontal shale gas and oil completion designs have evolved over the last several years. Effective completion design has become extremely important in developing these shale plays. In general, the industry has moved towards longer laterals, more stages, closer spacing between entry points, and increased proppant and fluid volumes. The use of completion diagnostics can be applied to supplement production data and stimulation modeling in optimizing the completion designs and reducing the slope of the learning curve in these emerging shale plays. Fluid and proppant tracer technologies and production profiling have been successfully employed in this optimization process. This paper will present several case histories demonstrating how these completion diagnostic tools have been successfully deployed to assess stimulation effectiveness. Case histories will be presented from the Marcellus, Eagle Ford, Haynesville, and Woodford shales in which these technologies have been employed to characterize proppant placement and load fluid clean-up and to quantify fluid and proppant communication between wells. In these case histories, the diagnostic results were used to evaluate perforation design, fluid and proppant placement as a function of the perforating scheme, lateral coverage, and fluid clean-up as it relates to lateral length, wellbore trajectory, changes in lithology, and frac fluid design.
This paper will characterize and validate the role of completion diagnostics in the completion optimization process.
