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.
