Multistage hydraulic stimulation has the potential to greatly expand the production of geothermal in the United States and worldwide. Zonal isolation and limited-entry completion overcome the problem of flow localization and generate hundreds or thousands of conductive fractures throughout a large volume of rock. In contrast, conventional geothermal stimulation designs are bullheaded as a single stage into a vertical or deviated wellbore, resulting in a small number of dominant flow-pathways.

Parent/child interactions pose a critical challenge for oil and gas shale producers. The industry has progressed significantly in its understanding of causes and mitigation. However, important uncertainties remain. Fracture-driven interactions or more commonly, “frac hits”, exhibit varied behaviors in different basins.

The stimulation design of hydraulically fractured wells has always pitted the engineer’s capability to maximize the fracture extent (or fracture half-length within the formation) versus the conductivity of the fracture pack generated by the deposited proppant material. In essence, the area of productive reservoir rock contacted by the hydraulic fracture treatment needs to be appropriately engineered to remain connected to the wellbore over the life of the well to maximize reservoir recovery.

We performed a modeling study calibrating a coupled “true” hydraulic fracturing and reservoir simulator to a complex set of observations from a parent-child well pad in the STACK play located in the Anadarko Basin area of Oklahoma. The model was constrained by sealed wellbore pressure monitoring, interference testing, pressure responses during frac hits, production data, and responses to chemical treatment.

In URTeC-123-2019, a group of operators and service companies presented a step-by-step procedure for interpretation of diagnostic fracture injection tests (DFITs). The procedure has now been applied on a wide variety of data across North and South America. This paper statistically summarizes results from 62 of these DFITs, contributed by ten operators spanning nine different shale plays.

We performed a modeling study to compare the feasibility of three geothermal designs: a closed- loop heat exchanger, a closed-loop heat exchanger with hydraulic fractures engineered to contain thermally conductive material, and an open-loop two-well doublet with multistage fracturing along horizontal laterals. The study was performed with a fully integrated hydraulic fracturing, reservoir, and wellbore simulator. Simulations were performed at a variety of temperatures and operating conditions. The findings show that the closed-loop heat exchanger designs yield very low energy production per foot of wellbore drilled.

Stage length and perforation cluster spacing are important design parameters for multi-stage hydraulic fracturing. This study aims to demonstrate that the interplay between subtle variations of the least principal stress (Shmin) with depth and the stress shadows induced by simultaneously propagating hydraulic fractures from multiple perforation clusters, primarily determines the propped and fractured area in the target formations.