Where Did the Proppant Go?

Abstract

Effective propped fracture half-lengths following a hydraulic fracture stimulation of a wellbore can be difficult to quantify. Therefore, different techniques for modeling proppant distributions must be applied to the same dataset for validation purposes. A proppant-filled Discrete Fracture Network (DFN) model is applied to two wells targeting the Muskwa and Evie Members of the Horn River Formation. Another technique for identifying microseismic signatures associated with the initial slickwater pad and the proppant-laden fluid was applied to both wells to obtain observed proppant distributions. The similarity of the distributions from each technique gives validation to each procedure and results can be used to optimize future completion techniques. The study objective is to compare proppant distributions using a proppant-filled DFN method to the observed proppant distributions using a technique to separate fluid-induced microseismicity from proppant-laden fluid-induced microseismicity. Proppant distributions are broken up by their perpendicular, parallel, and vertical components with respect to microseismic distances from their respective stage centers. The distributions of each component are compared in terms of their mean values +/− one standard deviation and results are within ∼15% of one another. These propped fracture distributions can be used to evaluate wellbore and stage spacing intervals. This suggests that when these techniques are combined, the proppant distribution in a formation following a hydraulic fracture stimulation can be well constrained to yield good estimates. The model results are used as a completions-diagnostics tool for evaluating the effectiveness of the stimulation and make future completion techniques more efficient and economically more valuable.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90193 © 2014 Rocky Mountain Section AAPG Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado, July 20-22, 2014