Fracturing Height Growth Restriction Technique Successfully Extended into Horizontal Wells in Ostracod Formation
Authors: Yudin Alexey , ElSebaee Mohamed , Stashevskiy Vladimir , Almethen Omar , AlJanahi Ahmed , Abdelrady Sayed , Darwish Saeed , AlMannai Hassan 
Published: January 2022

The Ostracod formation in the Awali brownfield is an extremely challenging layer to develop because the tight carbonate rock is interbedded with shaly streaks and because of the presence of a nearby water-bearing zone. Although the Ostracod formation has been in development since 1960, oil recovery has not yet reached 5% because past stimulation attempts experienced rapid production decline. The current project incorporated aggressive fracture design coupled with a unique height growth control (HGC) workflow, improving the development of Ostracod reserves.

The HGC technology is a combination of an engineering workflow supported by geomechanical modeling and an advanced simulator of in-situ kinetics and materials transport to model the placement of a customized, impermeable mixture of particles that will restrict fracture growth. The optimized treatment design included injections of the HGC mixture prior to the main fracturing treatment. This injection was done with a nonviscous fluid to improve settling to create an artificial barrier. After the success of a trial campaign in vertical wells, the technique was adjusted for the horizontal wellbores.

The high clay content within the Ostracod layers creates a significant challenge for successful stimulation. The high clay content prevents successful acid fracturing and leads to severe embedment with conventional proppant fracturing designs. We introduced a new approach to stimulate this formation with an aggressive tip-screenout design incorporating a large volume of 12/20-mesh proppant to obtain greater fracture width and conductivity, resulting in a significant and sustained oil production gain. The carefully designed HGC technique was efficient in avoiding fracture breakthrough into the nearby water zone, enabling treatments of up to 450,000 lbm to be successfully contained above a 20-ft-thick shaly barrier with small horizontal stress contrast. Independent measurements proved that the fracture height was successfully contained. This trial campaign in vertical wells proved that the combination of aggressive, large fracture designs with the HGC method could help unlock the Ostracod’s potential. Three horizontal wells were drilled and simulated, each with four stages of adjusted HGC technique to verify if this aggressive method was applicable to challenging sand admittance in case of transverse fractures. This rare implementation of HGC mixtures in horizontal wells showed operational success and proof of fracture containment based on pressure signatures and production monitoring.

The applied HGC technique was modified with additional injections and improved by advanced modeling that only recently became available. These contributed to a significant increase of treatment volume, making the jobs placed in the Ostracod some of the world’s largest utilizing HGC techniques. The experience gained in this project can be of a paramount value to any project dealing with hydraulic fracturing near a water formation with insufficient or uncertain stress barriers.