About this Event
How to Leverage What We've Learned About Hydraulic Fractures by Garrett Fowler, ResFrac Corporation
Understanding how hydraulic fractures propagate, where the proppant ends up, and how they connect with the reservoir is fundamental to designing effective development strategies. While rock properties vary across basins, the physics of fracture mechanics is consistent, allowing learnings from one region to extend to others.
In the last five years, the quality and quantity of subsurface diagnostics has driven a rapid increase in the industry’s understanding of hydraulic fracture geometry and proppant placement. Subsurface insights can largely be summarized into three themes: fractures are large planar features; near-wellbore effects may overprint far-field fracture geometries; and fractures predominantly produce from unaltered rock permeability.
Armed with deeper understanding of hydraulic fracturing processes, completions teams are empowered to deviate from “manufacturing mode” development and instead employ prescriptive designs for specific geologic, geomechanical, and depletion environments.
This talk integrates the latest learnings of hydraulic fracture characterization from case studies to present a cohesive summary of what fractures look like, where the proppant is placed, how fluids are produced through fractures, and why this knowledge informs better frac designs and better wells.
If a particular topic is of interest to the section, emphasis may be given to one or more of: parent/child and depletion effects, refracturing, conductivity loss (proppant embedment, crushing), geomechanical property characterization, fracturing in geothermal, geomechanical considerations and fracturing for CO2 sequestration, or diagnostic technologies for unconventionals.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Alberta Innovates/Innotech, Karl Clark Road Northwest, Edmonton, AB, Canada