US Fracturing Test Data Trickling Out With a Lot More Promised
Authors: Rassenfoss Stephen 
Published: September 2019

A fracturing test site in West Virginia has quietly made a data trove available on the website of the Marcellus Shale Energy and Environment Lab (MSEEL).

Meanwhile, completion experts and students are impatiently waiting for data owed by Hydraulic Fracturing Test Site I in the Permian Basin on wells drilled and completed back in 2015. At the 2018 Unconventional Resources Technology Conference (URTeC), an official with the partnership promised those results by the end of last year, and this year promised them by the end of 2019.

The Marcellus website shares data on two highly instrumented gas well completions back in 2014 and 2015, plus two older wells and a monitoring well near-by. The federally funded public/private partnership conducted numerous tests on wells operated by Northeast Natural Energy, the oil company partner on the project.

One of the most interesting tests tried to answer the question: can an engineered fracturing design, with stage lengths varied based on rock properties, outperform the commonly used geometric designs dividing the well into even-sized stages.

The answer was yes. A paper at this year’s URTeC concluded that total production from “future wells could be 10-20% greater if one can exploit the technologic advantages gained for MSEEL in a more cost-effective fashion.”

Those who argue against engineered designs say the value added by the engineered variations do not justify the added cost of executing a plan that varies from stage to stage. Engineers on both sides of that argument will want more testing, and the public/private partnership is now working on a six-well test site nearby.

Data Shortage

During URTeC, representatives of the Hydraulic Fracturing Test Site I offered seven presentations filling an afternoon session, but no papers were available with details.

During the opening session, moderator Tom Blasingame, a professor at Texas A&M University, asked a US Department of Energy (DOE) official when the data would be publicly available. The $11 million in funding from the DOE included a standard requirement that the data be shared within 2 years.

Shawn Bennett, DOE deputy secretary for oil and natural gas, pointed out that the industry partners that made significant contributions to these projects—in this case, $15 million including data and expertise—should be compensated with early use of the information before the industry sees it.

Blasingame pointed out that college students and faculty lack real-world fracturing data to do research and teach students about shale.

When asked about data sharing, Jordan Ciezobka, the general manager of the project, said data will be released later this year, but that there are many challenges associated with doing so. Those obstacles include finding a way to share pictures and CT scans of cores and dealing with massive volumes of data. There is also the problem of removing historical information contributed by Laredo Petroleum—the company that provided the test pad—and he said there were concerns about how to “handle the potential traffic; it could be a train•wreck.”