General Meeting Society of Petroleum Engineers Denver Februayr 20, 2013

 SPE General Meeting
Topic:Â Â Â Â Â Introducing a New DFIT Design Tool and DFIT Guidelines for Horizontal Wells
Speaker:Â Â Â Â Â David P. Craig, PhD, PE, Reservoir Development Consulting Date:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Time:       11:30 am Place:        Denver Athletic Club                       4th Floor                       1325 Glenarm Place                       Denver, CO 80204
 Cost: $25.00… Show more ($30.00 at the door, if space is available) Reservation Deadline: Noon, Monday February 18, 2013.  Deadline for reservations has been changed to Noon on the Monday before the General Meetings. or Call 303-620-9080 for reservations. Abstract:
Fracture-injection/falloff tests (DFIT) have been routinely implemented since the late 1990s to understand leakoff mechanisms, identify fracture closure stress, estimate initial reservoir pressure, and determine permeability-thickness in unconventional reservoirs. In almost every case, a DFIT is the only well test that will be completed during the lifecycle of an unconventional well, and currently, a fracture-injection/falloff test is an accepted standard practice for evaluating an unconventional reservoir, including a shale reservoir. A basic DFIT design requires specifying an injection volume, an injection rate, and a shut-in time requirement, and over the past 15 years, DFIT designs were largely based on experience and empirical results in analog formations, but with all the unknowns in a pilot project, the design often requires simply pumping at or near a constant rate for 10 minutes and recording falloff data until the gauges run out of memory, which is not exactly an engineered approach to well testing. This paper introduces a fracture-injection/falloff test design methodology that allows the required falloff time to be determined for different injection volumes and rates. Additionally, the reservoir area of investigation can be estimated, and an engineered solution can be found for the trade-off between a larger area of investigation and shorter shut-in time requirements. The methodology combines a fracture propagation model with reservoir pressure-transient solutions to generate predicted pressure versus time data, which allows the time to closure and time to the beginning of specific flow regimes to be estimated from input reservoir properties. Developing a design methodology has also led to specifying design guidelines for implementing fracture-injection/falloff tests in unconventional reservoirs, including guidelines for horizontal well cased-hole versus openhole DFITs, area of investigation, injection rates, gauge specifications, and gauge location (surface, bottomhole, etc.). Numerous examples will be presented to demonstrate how the design tool is implemented and the guidelines are used for DFITs in horizontal wells with cemented (plug and perf) and uncemented (openhole packer) completions.
 Biography:
David P. Craig is owner of Reservoir Development Consulting in Denver, which focuses on state-of-the-art fracture-injection/falloff analysis, refracture-candidate identification, and multifractured horizontal well production analysis to determine the number of fractures producing along a lateral. Previously, Dr. Craig was a Chief Engineer for Halliburton where he developed a prototype model for propagation of complex hydraulic fracture patterns. Dr. Craig earned a BS in Petroleum Engineering from Texas Tech University in 1989, an MS in Petroleum Engineering from Texas A&M University in 1991, and a PhD in Petroleum Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2006. He is also a licensed engineer in the State of Colorado. Dr. Craig has worked in the United States Rocky Mountain region since 1993 and was a member of Halliburton’s Rocky Mountain Technical Team between 1996 and 2007.  In 2000, he was awarded the Henry Matson Technical Service Award from the Denver Section of SPE in “recognition of significant contributions in engineering design and diagnostics of hydraulic fractures," and in 2006 Dr. Craig received the 2006 Award of Excellence for Outstanding Research from the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University. Rob received a BS in Petroleum Engineering from Marietta College. He also holds an MS in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He has authored 23 papers for SPE along with 8 journal publications. He wrote the chapter on oil PVT correlations in the recently updated Petroleum Engineering Handbook as well as coauthored a chapter in Gas Well Deliquification.

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