Horizontal hydraulic fracture propagation is believed to be widespread in shale plays where the frac gradient approaches the overburden – such as the Vaca Muerta, Utica, and Montney. However, horizontal propagation is nearly always ignored

Proppant transport in the well is an intriguing topic that has attracted a lot of interest in recent years [1-8]. Proppant transport processes determine the uniformity of proppant placement, which has a direct impact on

Below are links to watch two recently recorded talks. The first was a presentation with ThinkGeoEnergy discussing the impressive results from Fervo Energy’s recent Project Red pilot. The second was a presentation with whitson summarizing

This blog post provides practical tips for interpreting Diagnostic Fracture Injection Tests (DFITs) using the ‘compliance method’ procedure initially developed by McClure et al. (2016) and refined in the paper URTeC-2019-123, which summarized results from

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

This ARMA Hydraulic Fracturing Community (HFC) presentation summarizes the work on proppant transport in horizontal perforated wellbores. Specifically, it discusses the model for proppant distribution between perforations depending on their orientation and location within the

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

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.

This blog post describes a new capability in ResFrac to capture the effect of ‘fracture swarms’ on production decline trends. Based on work from Acuna (2020), the idea is that variable spacing between fractures causes

Genuine radial flow is rare in shale DFITs. If it does occur, it is typically observed in tests with very low injection volume (less than 10-20 bbl), unusually long shut-in (longer than one week), and

In this post, I will walk through a simple example of using SWPM to calibrate the fracture geometries of a hypothetical data set leveraging the ResFrac Automated History Matching functionality to expedite the workflow. In

In this blog post, we review a refracturing and economic optimization case study. The model and history match are loosely based on “SPE Data Repository Well #1,” a publicly available refracturing and production dataset from

Field scale hydraulic fracture simulations reveal a variety of complex fracture geometries. Very often stress interaction between the fractures leads to very asymmetric fracture growth within a stage. At the same time, for some other

There has been a lot of controversy over the past five years over how to estimate stress/closure pressure from shut-in pressure transients from Diagnostic Fracture Injection Tests (DFITs). Today, I am reporting on an important

Should we use ‘planar fracture’ models or ‘complex fracture network’ models? Exciting new field data has been published by operators that helps us answer this question, at least for modeling hydraulic fracturing in shale. In this

This post grapples with a complicated, nuanced, and important topic: what do hydraulic fractures look like and how should we model them? Should we use planar fracture models or ‘complex’ hydraulic fracture network models? On

Rate Transient Analysis (RTA) is commonly used to analyze production in unconventional reservoirs. The concept of RTA is to use rate signatures of producing wells to estimate properties such as permeability and fracture surface area.

Typically, hydraulic fracture simulations predict symmetrical propagation away from the wellbore. For example, the figure below shows a ResFrac simulation of fracturing and production in a 200 ft horizontal stage with 50 ft cluster spacing.

Multistage hydraulic fracturing in horizontal wells enables economic production from low permeability resources. A variety of parameters needs to be optimized: stage spacing, cluster spacing, well spacing, well landing depth, injection rate, injection volume per

In this post, I discuss an important new paper, “Sampling a Stimulated Rock Volume: An Eagle Ford Example,” by Raterman et al., which was presented at URTeC in July. This paper is an instant classic

Introduction Back in February, I was at an SPE DFIT workshop where David Craig (one of the vocal advocates of the ‘holistic’ method of picking fracture closure) said that he would have a paper at

In this post, I address a topic that seems esoteric, but it has critical implications for understanding how DFITs respond to closure. In turn, this directly affects how we estimate stress and permeability. The question