Abstract
Fracture-driven interactions (FDI’s) occur on most modern drilling and completion programs. These well-to-well interactions can be of benefit, but it is often difficult to quantify the lasting effects of these interactions and benchmark it for comparison.
The approach for quantifying the effects of fracture-driven interactions in this paper is to compare the magnitude and duration of communication events identified by chemical tracers for wells in a specific basin. Metrics are established to compare communication between projects to determine the effects of "common contributors" to significant fracture-driven interactions. The common contributors compared in this paper are well spacing, depletion effects from prior production, perforation cluster design, geologic features, and stimulation treatment design.
A "Communication Intensity" metric (CI) is established to quantify the amount of communication taking place on a particular pad or project. This is computed for hundreds of projects across a basin or multiple basins. The CI is used as a performance indicator to compare current project-level communication to area or basin-level benchmarks. Case histories are presented in this paper that utilize the CI metric to determine the effects of common contributors of well communication to established basin benchmarks. In addition to project-level communication, localized (well-level) communication events are investigated to determine the cause of the individual event and if any preventative or mitigative strategy could have been applied in the job design or execution phase.
Few if any industry benchmarks are available to compare the immediate, intermittent, and lasting effects of fracture-driven interactions (FDI’s) on a project or well level. The results of this paper outline a process for comparing projects to optimize well spacing and fracturing treatment design, as well as reflect on known and unknown features contributing to significant interactions.
