Abstract
In the remote Horn River Shale of North East British Columbia, Canada the key challenge operators’ face is high costs related to completions in the horizontal wells. A strategy was developed to focus on efficiency improvements to make a positive impact on the economics. Previous projects were examined and a two prong approach was developed: first we needed to procure as many extra resources as could be anticipated to ensure continuous operations, and second we would have to have more than one critical path operation simultaneously so that costly activities could continue uninterrupted.
The resource planning includes the drilling of multiple wells on the pad and having most of the wells available for operations during the stimulation campaign. It also includes specially designed equipment such as bulk sand handling equipment, water handling, slurry handling, wellhead protection, SCADA systems and custom flow back equipment. In addition, new ways of managing the human resources at the site were implemented. To manage the critical path activities, a protocol was developed to manage surface and down hole interactions. A safety system was developed to support the integration of these challenging operations. An offsite real time operations room was employed were all the sensor data from the site was available, including frac data, water and sand supply, pressure and H2S.
The resulting impact on efficiency will be discussed in detail, including reaching a field frac efficiency record for the Horn River.
