Downturn Represents Stress Test for Unconventional Hydraulic Fracture Modeling

Abstract

Developers of the latest generation of unconventional hydraulic fracturing models are hoping that current weak oil and gas prices will generate newfound interest in their software technology. After years of rewriting old programs and coming up with new ones, the modelers say they have advanced the industry’s ability to digitally simulate how shale reservoirs react to hydraulic fracturing. If the technology works, they may have overcome the major limitations that have stymied the adoption of fracture modeling since the onset of the North American shale revolution. Those working on this new front include service company giants such as Schlumberger, which in recent years has built and acquired a number of modeling, simulation, and 3D seismic technologies to capture this budding market. Smaller and much younger startups are also in the hunt, such as Sigma3 and FracGeo, who teamed up in the summer of 2014 to introduce and market new unconventional reservoir models. Several other players are pushing their own approaches but the concept they all share is that if shale producers can predict what subsurface properties dictate a quality completion, they can land wells in geologically and geomechanically favorable sweet spots and spend their capital on initiating fracture stages only in the most likely-to-produce sections of a well. The technology could also reduce the financial pain incurred through time-consuming, trial-and-error pilot programs used to determine a particular field’s best completion practices. Ultimately, the technological goal is to lower break-even costs and deliver sustainability to the flagging shale business by engineering wells that produce more oil and gas from fewer wells, with fewer fracturing stages. “People are struggling to make a profit with the current oil price just by drilling every location,” on a geometric grid, said Colin Sayers, an adviser with Schlumberger who works on the company’s unconventional modeling and seismic technologies. The approach he is pitching is to “put the wells in the right place with the right orientation, and choose where you should complete based on data rather than just guesswork.”