Completion Design Evaluated by Use of Field Offset Well-Pressure Measurements
Authors: Carpenter Chris 
Published: May 2021

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 201346, “Are We Overstimulating Our Laterals? Evaluating Completion Design Practices Based on Field Offset Well-Pressure Measurements,” by Puneet Seth, SPE, The University of Texas at Austin, and Brendan Elliott, SPE, and Trevor Ingle, SPE, Devon Energy, et al., prepared for the 2020 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, originally scheduled to be held in Denver, Colorado, 5–7 October. The paper has not been peer reviewed.

Increased injection volumes coupled with a suboptimal completion design can lead to overstimulation at current well-spacing densities. In the complete paper, the authors analyze offset well-pressure measurements in the Permian Basin to evaluate if a fracturing job is overstimulated. Additionally, numerical modeling studies are performed to evaluate the extent of overstimulation in different scenarios and provide recommendations to maximize the capital efficiency of a fracturing job. In their analysis, the authors focus on the scenario in which fracturing hits occur when child-well fractures intersect with the parent well.

Field Data Analysis

Pumping for the full designed volume and time (typically 90 minutes) according to well-stimulation procedures is currently common in the industry. Often, the observation of hydraulic interactions is not coupled with a decision to alter or change the stimulation.

The authors analyzed the offset well-pressure response monitored with a surface pressure gauge in multiple parent wells in the Permian Basin during stimulation in nearby child wells. The child wells were stimulated after roughly 1 year of production from the parent wells. The focus of this study was to identify fracture-driven interactions—specifically the timing of intersection of the child-well fractures with the offset parent wells, which are recorded as massive hydraulic pressure responses. The results of this analysis for different well pairs are presented in the complete paper.

To better understand the factors that affect fracture propagation from the child wells toward the parent wells, fracture arrival times, and capital efficiency of a fracturing job, a series of numerical simulations was performed with a fully coupled hydraulic fracturing simulator.

Simulation Results

Numerical simulations were performed using an integrated hydraulic fracturing and reservoir simulator developed at The University of Texas at Austin. This simulator solves for flow and geomechanics in the reservoir, fracture, and wellbore domains in a tightly coupled manner. Hydraulic fractures are modeled as compliant discontinuities in the reservoir rather than high-permeability gridblocks. This is important in order to capture the stress alterations around a propagating fracture accurately.

Effect of Parent-Well Production (Depleted Region).

For this study, two scenarios were analyzed. In the first case, fracture propagation from a child well stimulated near a recently fractured unproduced parent well (no depletion) was considered. In this case, the fracture from the child well propagates away from the parent well because of elevated stresses near the parent well.

In the second case, a child well is stimulated near a parent well that has been producing for 300 days before child-well stimulation. In this scenario, the child-well fracture propagates toward the parent well because of a depleted region that develops near the parent well (because of production) and relaxes the reservoir stresses around the parent well. This causes the child-well fracture to grow preferentially toward the parent well (toward the low-stress region). In fact, in this scenario, as the fracture reaches the depleted reservoir region, its growth accelerates toward the parent well and intersects with the parent well. Even minor depletion can induce asymmetric growth of infill child-well fractures toward the parent well.