ResFrac at the Comrades Marathon in South Africa (an Ultramarathon)

Comrades Marathon is the world’s largest and oldest ultramarathon.  The first race was in 1921. The number of registrants for this year was capped at 20k.  The marathon runs from the city of Durban to Pietermaritzburg (“up” run) or in the other direction (“down” run). The “down” run is a little bit longer at around 90 km, while the  “up” run is 87 km. This year we did the “down” run, but it was shortened to 87.7 km or  54.5 miles. “15 minutes less of pleasure” – as one of my friends said. 

Impact of well orientation on well productivity

Hydraulic fractures tend to propagate in a plane that is perpendicular to the least principal stress, as noted by Hubbert and Willis in 1957. As a result, unconventional oil and gas wells are typically drilled in the direction of Shmin to maximize drainage area. However, in some regions, due to acreage constrains by operators, wells are drilled in different directions, regardless of the stress orientation to maximize acreage production by maximizing the number of wells per acreage.

ResFrac at the Breckenridge Imperial Challenge

Cyclists at top of Breckinridge Mountain

It’s that time of year again for our ResFrac team to embark upon the Imperial Challenge in Breckenridge, CO! As with last year, Egor, Dirk (ResFrac investor), and Garrett tackled the challenge this year. The Imperial Challenge is an annual triathlon where racers bike or run from the town of Breckenridge 6 miles and 850 feet up to the base of the Breckenridge ski resort, then skin (ski uphill) 3000 ft to the peak of the resort at 12,998 ft, then… ski off the other side.

Technical barriers for deep closed-loop geothermal

This is the most exciting time in my lifetime for geothermal. There are many, many innovative things happening. To name a few – promising new approaches to Enhanced Geothermal Systems, geothermal projects in sedimentary and lower enthalpy formations, new approaches for geothermal exploration, lithium extraction from produced brines, geothermal energy storage, integrations with CO2 storage and capture, and new technologies for producing energy from hot water that is coproduced with oil and gas. However, this post is about a concept about which I remain skeptical – deep closed-loop heat exchangers (McClure, 2021). These designs are sometimes called ‘Advanced Geothermal Systems,’ AGS (Malek et al., 2022).

Modeling simulfracs and subsurface implications

Simulfrac’s are growing in popularity (see 2021 JPT article for when the trend was just gaining momentum). The idea is that one pumping crew can treat two wells simultaneously versus one well at a time. As such, a frac crew may zipper four wells at a time versus two. At ResFrac we are seeing an increase in simulfrac interest across our consulting and license customers. Simulfrac’ing wells within the ResFrac software is simple to set up without any complicated modifications – so this makes ResFrac an ideal platform to investigate the effects of simulfracs.

A New Approach for Interference Test Analysis: Quantifying the Degree of Production Impact

This blog post summarizes a new procedure for interpreting interference tests in shale. The full procedure and a detailed writeup are provided by Almasoodi et al. (2023). Interference tests are one of the most effective diagnostics for assessing communication between neighboring wells. This information is critical for optimizing completion design and well spacing.