Hydraulic Fracturing Conference Offers New Insights
Authors: Rassenfoss Stephen , Jacobs Trent 
Published: April 2017

Conference review

The SPE Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference and Exhibition took place 24–26 January in The Woodlands, Texas. The event included more than 50 technical paper presentations, as well as 90 exhibitors, discussing and showcasing new hydraulic fracturing technologies, various applications, and learnings from fracture-stimulated wells. Below are some of the highlights from the conference.

 

Initial Impressions of Wells May Be Misleading

Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor

The mostly widely reported production data proved to be a bad indicator of future output.

A study presented at the conference considered whether the widely reported 30-day production total is a good way to evaluate a well compared with less frequently offered longer-term numbers.

“Production at 30 days tends to be an unreliable estimate,” said Edward Ifejika, a field operations engineer for Total who did the research while he was a student at Texas A&M University (SPE 184817). The number after 90 days offers a much better estimate of future gas production and the improvement from there is limited.

 

Getting a Better Look at Propped Fractures

Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor

Carbo Ceramics is getting a clearer look at where the proppant goes. The ceramic proppant maker showed much-improved images at this year’s conference (SPE 184880) compared with the ones shown last year, as well as a new set of images showing three stages of a Marcellus gas well.

The presentation at the start of the conference’s technical sessions drew a large crowd. The method discussed uses metallically coated ceramic proppant that is activated by an electric current run through the reservoir. The new method promises a deep look that is not available using alternatives such as radioactive markers, which are visible only within a couple feet of the wellbore.

 

Think-Tank Founder Touts Benefits of Fossil Fuels

Trent Jacobs, JPT Digital Editor

Higher life expectancy, plentiful food, and soaring gross domestic product are among the benefits that much of the world’s population has enjoyed since widespread use of fossil fuels began more than a century ago. They are also the central pillars to Alex Epstein’s the-sis of why fossil fuel production, and the engineering involved, equates to a moral obligation.

Epstein, founder of the for-profit think tank Center for Industrial Progress and author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, was the featured speaker of this year’s conference.

Addressing several hundred industry professionals, Epstein used the rise of the North American shale sector to highlight how, despite making possible the many advantages of living in the modern age, the wider oil and gas industry is losing the public relations battle.

 

Institute Seeks To Boost Knowledge in Permian Basin

Trent Jacobs, JPT Digital Editor

For all of the upstream activity going on in the Permian Basin of Texas, it can be difficult to assess which horizontal well strategies are working best and why. The primary reason is operators in Texas are not required to share as much detailed drilling and completion information as they are in other major oil-producing states such as North Dakota, home to one of the shale sector’s most revered public databases.

But with the recent formation of the Texas Oil and Gas Institute (TOGI), it is expected that the Permian will soon become a much more well understood shale play. TOGI was established in 2015 by the regents of the University of Texas (UT) system, which manages oil and gas mineral rights across 2 million acres of land in west Texas.

 

Saudis Find Proppant Source in Their Own Back Yards

Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor

When hydraulic fracturing arrived in Saudi Arabia, there was something lacking.

While the reserves of tight gas are bountiful and sand covers the desert, Saudi Aramco has had to import ceramic proppant to hold open the fractures created. Sand dunes in its deserts provide a seemingly endless supply of sand, but when the national oil company studied those grains of sand, it found that they were “nice and round but not very strong,” said Kirk Bartko, a senior petroleum engineering consultant for Saudi Aramco, during a presentation at the conference (SPE 184823).

It was a second-grade proppant, which was not quite up to the demand of wells typically 10,000 ft deep where proppant faces closure pressures of about 11,000 psi. The likely result would be sand grains crushed into fine particles likely to block the flow of gas.