Abstract
A recent series of tight gas discoveries in the Amin format ion of the greater Fahud area represents some of the most exciting exploration success of this decade in the Sultanate of Oman. The structures have been evaluated as containing very significant amounts of gas locked in a challenging deep and hot environment requiring hydraulic fracture stimulation. Recently, horizontal well trials started taking place in two of the structures aiming for testing efficiency of this type of completion and further evaluation of formation deliverability. Successful completion of horizontal laterals would open new horizons in this challenging environment. Achieving this goal is not possible without thorough evaluation of reservoir conditions followed by completion and stimulation. Horizontal well performance in a tight gas reservoir is largely controlled by the number of hydraulic fractures placed along the lateral and their spacing and conductivity. Designing a reservoir access strategy might not be a trivial task, either, when the well trajectory intersects several productive vertical layers and the reservoir properties are changing laterally. Manual selection of intervals and perforations could be susceptible to mistakes and may be perceived as subjective at times, while also being time and effort consuming. The workflow based on reservoir quality (RQ) and completion quality (CQ) developed in North America for unconventional resources for optimizing completion decisions brings engineering to this process for stage and cluster selection in horizontal sections. This project applies the same reservoir-centric RQ/CQ workflow integrating all available data and creating specific criteria and cutoffs applicable to a specific tight gas field in the Sultanate of Oman.
