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March 25-26, 2015 | Houston | Texas
A thorough understanding of the physical phenomenon occurring in the
reservoir, leads to greater insight when analyzing production data, and predicting
changes in production behavior as completion methods are altered. What this
means is that high-density fracture stages that accelerate depletion of a reservoir
may not optimize the value in these wells. If we can achieve the same recovery
with lower capital expenditure by designing well completions for less initial
production, but also lower decline rates, we can push production into the future,
where we may expect oil prices to increase.
Why is the Reservoir
Engineering for
Unconventional Oil & Gas
Congress important in
the current low oil price
environment?
the performance of the
base production forecast
significantly impacts the
production exit rate at the
end of the year, as new
wells are not being brought
online to replace the natural
decline of existing wells.
What follows is a necessary
increase in the accuracy
of long-term performance
forecasts of unconventional
wells.
A low price environment
causes lower capital budgets
for E&Ps, and less wells
drilled and completed with a
given time frame. This leads
to a greater contribution
of any individual project to
a company’s production,
and errors in forecasting
production performance
can cause a greater amount
of skew from planning
estimates. In contrast, as
operators drill more wells
in a high-price, high-activity
environment, errors in
forecasts, both high and
low, often average out (law
of large numbers). With
a lower capital spend,
Early-time forecasts can be
quite accurate, due to the
large number of wells that
have been drilled over the
past few years, for which we
have much data regarding
the period of several months
after initial production.
Ironically, some of the older
wells are not particularly
useful for modeling newer
wells. The first wells in
a new play will perform
differently the those drilled
in a development operation
- there is an issue of long
transitionary flow regimes
in unbounded reservoirs
for these first wells,
juxtaposed against inter-well
David Fulford
Senior Reservoir
Engineer
Apache Corporation
interference for those wells
which follow. An incorrect
extrapolation of this shortterm performance leads to a
greater differen