While production from shale formation has been made possible mainly by advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, there are still many challenges in production from these reserves. While slick water fracturing technique stimulates a large reservoir volume through generation of complex fracture systems, very sharp production decline has been observed in many reservoirs. One of the main reason for this rapid decline is the limited contribution to flow from smaller fracture networks generated, which do not received much proppant. These proppant-less artificial and natural fractures heal up once the net pressure in the fracture goes below the closure stress and hence reduce the producible region only to the primary fractures.
To make the production from the shale plays sustainable over the life of a well, there is a need to make sure that the network of natural fractures, secondary, and tertiary artificial fractures are conductive and remain productive even after increase in closure stress. While generation of massive fracture system will not be possible without low viscosity slick water, proppant placement will be limited only to the primary fractures with this technique. In order to overcome this challenge of low conductivity fracture network, we tested a technique of combining reactive fluid with slick water fracturing.
