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.

The purpose of this blog post is to cover recently developed ResFrac capability that allows investigation of the effect of natural fractures on hydraulic fracture propagation. While this option has always been available for the ‘discrete’ propagation algorithm, now it also has become available for the ‘continuous’ algorithm. There are some noticeable changes compared to the previous implementation and they are covered next.

Last week we held our Fourth Annual ResFrac Symposium. The premise of the event is to bring together ResFrac users to share use cases, best practices, and general developments in the industry. This year was our biggest yet, with nearly 100 people joining either in-person or online throughout the day-long event, representing 26 different oil, gas, and geothermal operating companies, seven universities, and several service company collaborators.

June 27 (Reuters) – U.S. shale oil producers are returning to existing wells and giving them a second, high-pressure blast to lift output for a fraction of the cost of finishing a new well. These “re-fracs” are taking hold as shale oil producers look to take advantage of $100 a barrel crude without making big investments in new wells and fields.

For the first time in more than two years, the entire (almost!) ResFrac team gathered in Denver. We mixed education (thank you to our friends at Liberty Services for showing us the nuts and bolts of frac’ing)…… with fun.

We at ResFrac are coauthoring four papers at HFTC. The papers describe a parent/child case study performed with Devon in the SCOOP/STACK, our new automated history matching and economic optimization tools, a new crack propagation algorithm designed to improve numerical accuracy and handling of thin layers, and a modeling study on application of multistage hydraulic fracturing for geothermal energy extraction.