For this month’s Office Hours, we had a presentation from Serhii Kryvenko, Reservoir Engineer on ExxonMobil’s Unconventional Tech Team, titled “Proppant Trapping and Washout in Rough Hydraulic Fractures.”

Abstract: The Kryvenko (2025) model introduces an extension to the proppant trapping model proposed by McClure et al. (2020) by incorporating a washout term that accounts for localized bed-load transport processes within rough hydraulic fractures. The extended formulation enables remobilization of previously trapped proppant when local fluid velocity exceeds a critical threshold derived from Shields theory. By incorporating dependencies on particle size and density and fluid properties, the model offers a scalable framework for simulating proppant behavior under dynamic flow conditions and may potentially unlock new frac designs.