The dynamics of oil production in the United States of America (USA) for the one hundred-year period is presented, it is shown that the peak of production falls on may 2019 - 12.4 million bar/day. Currently, the USA, previously significantly dependent on imports, has become a net exporter of oil and gas and plans to further increase production of hydrocarbons due to the intensive development of hard-to-recover reserves. At the time of 2018, hard-to-recover reserves oil production in the USA (tight and shale formations) was already approaching 2/3 of total USA oil production and amounted to 61 % (6.5 million bar/day) of the total USA oil production (10.6 million bar/day). The main contribution to the production of hard-to-recover reserves oil in the United States bring Bakken formations, Eagle Ford and Permian Basin, with the development of which the «shale revolution» began. At the moment, the production of hard-to-recover reserves reservoir formations in the USA is about 6 % and 10 % of world oil and gas production, respectively. Due to the presence of such reservoirs in Russia, there is a need for their study, generalization and analysis of technological experience, taking into account the geological features of the US hard-to-recover reserves deposits. The geological prerequisites for the development technologies of hard-torecover reserves, the dynamics of technological efficiency of hydraulic fracturing operations (frac) are considered. It is shown that the large-scale introduction of fracturing operations and multistage fracturing had a significant impact on the efficiency of oil fields with hard-to-recover reserves, characterizing by the presence of low and ultra-low permeable reservoirs. Thus, the number of stages of hydraulic fracturing in the 1950s - early 1990s was about 10 - 30 thousand stages/year, while the last peak levels are close to the value of 500 thousand stages/year. The technological development of pumping systems, together with the development of well completion technologies, led to an increase in the number of fracture stages per well by about 20 times, the mass of the injected proppant - by about 40 times. As a result, the design of well completion and hydraulic fracturing redirects on a more dense arrangement of wells with tighter frac port placement. In addition, new generation hydraulic fracturing fluids are currently used to increase the utilization rate of produced water along the way, and a cheaper proppant of lower quality is used. The dynamics of the wells drilling activity in the fields of hard-to-recover reserves in the United States is presented, and marked that throughout the history of innovative development of technologies of development of hard-to-recover reserves most of the world's drilling activities occurred in the United States, about 10 % - in Canada and only 3 % - in the OPEC countries. During the «shale revolution» most of the wells drilled in the US were completed with hydraulic fracturing, and now the share of new oil wells completed with hydraulic fracturing reaches 80 %, and gas 90 %. The main aspects of the development of hydraulic fracturing operations technologies are presented. The role of improving the quality of proppants used in the implementation of hydraulic fracturing operations, development of well completion systems with hydraulic fracturing, well drilling technologies are presented.
Read full abstract