Abstract

In hydraulic fracturing, it is critical to optimize the fracture design and other development and completion decisions like well spacing, well placement, spacing between fracture, volume of fracturing fluid, quantity of proppant, pump rate etc. This can be achieved by quantifying the fracture geometry created as function of incremental fracturing fluid volume and proppant quantity injected.

A novel tracer design and analysis method is developed and piloted as a fracture diagnostic technology to quantify the growth rate of fracture geometry created and drainage volume for incremental frac fluid volume and proppant quantity. In this method, combination of unique liquid and solid tracers (both oil and water) is injected in each incremental (10 to 20%) frac fluid volume and proppant mass of an individual hydraulic frac stage. The interpretation method, based on swept volume estimation for each incremental segment tracer (Jain, 2021), is then used to achieve the objective of fracture geometry quantification.

We piloted this method in 4 wells on a 6 well pad in West Texas as an accelerated learning pilot where 5 different completion designs were deployed in each of the wells. The tracer application design (tracer type, quantity, and concentration, count of tracers for each frac stage, incremental volume for varying tracer type, etc) is optimized for each completion design using learnings from preliminary modeling work of fracture fluid and proppant placement mechanism inside fracture, and the return profile of tracer of collected samples from injected and offset wells. The analysis of the tracer data utilized samples collected from both the offsets and the fractured well. This novel tracer injection scheme allowed us to quantify and present the frac and drainage growth rate as a function of the frac fluid volume and proppant injected by assessing the incremental area/volume generated by each incremental portion of the frac fluid and proppant injected (Jain, 2021). We also quantified the production performance of the different completions designs though a proprietary tracer-based flow profiling and surveillance technique.

This work highlights the novel tracer application methodology, design steps, analysis methodology, and results which will enable accelerated optimization of frac and completion designs.

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