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How to Diagnose False Radial Flow in a Diagnostic Fracture Injection Test (DFIT)
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 relatively high permeability (greater than one microdarcy). Genuine radial flow should only be diagnosed if it occurs after an extended (at least one log cycle) period of after-closure linear flow. If ‘false radial’ flow is misdiagnosed and used to estimate permeability, it leads to a large overestimate (10-100x).
DOE Innovators Roundtable on Enhanced Geothermal Systems with Secretary Granholm
This week, the US Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, was in Houston to announce an ‘Earthshot’ initiative to accelerate domestic production of zero-emission, baseload geothermal energy Secretary Granholm announced the initiative at a press conference, and then hosted a roundtable discussion with Reginald DesRoches, the president of Rice University, and a group of innovators in the geothermal space. ResFrac CEO Mark McClure was one of the participants in the roundtable. Sec. Granholm asked him how to increase engagement from the oil and gas industry in geothermal.
Reflections from the 2022 Geothermal Rising Conference
This is an exciting time for EGS. Multistage hydraulic fracturing has tremendous potential to improve the productivity of geothermal wells in low permeability formations. Projects are happening right now to test this concept in full-scale EGS wells. If they prove successful, we could soon see a major increase in geothermal energy production.
Automated history matching to fracture geometries as measured by Volume to First Response (VFR): A Tutorial
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 a follow-on post, I use the model to demonstrate some intuitions on fracture geometry using the Sensitivity Analysis functionality as well as some nuances of VFR calibration.
Highlights on propagation from preexisting fractures in ResFrac
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.
ResFrac’s Automated Economic Optimization Tool
ResFrac’s automated optimization tool allows you to quickly and easily identify the economically best well spacing and frac design. This blog post steps through a simple demo of our built-in economics engine that is similar to those used by commercial software in the industry. It accounts for details such as working interest, different types of taxes, time-varying operations cost, etc.
2022 ResFrac Annual Symposium
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.
