What's New in Production

“The highest-IQ company in oilfield service…,” so goes the opinion of one industry observer, and, while impossible to designate with certainty—this business is lopsided with people on the right side of the bell curve—Core Lab would certainly be in the running for the trophy.

In its 81-year history, the company has devised numerous analysis techniques. The company claims to have introduced core analysis as a commercial service to the petroleum industry, based on the early work of James A. Lewis, Core Lab’s first president, on the determination of the permeability coefficient of a porous media. The company’s second employee, W. L. (Bill) Horner, conceived the summation of fluids method for measuring porosity by adding the oil and water content and void space in a core sample. He also patented the downdraft retort used in oil and water measurements and developed the method of injecting mercury into a sample to determine its void space.

Four major industry trends. The rest of the history is equally fascinating, but let’s fast-forward. As a preamble to our main topic, the company recently identified four major industry trends that it believes will shape tomorrow’s oil field:

• Increasing interest in EOR from tight oil reservoirs;
• Finer proppants in the initial portion of hydraulic fracturing treatments;
• Increasing proppant loads and frac stages per well; and
• Big Data and artificial intelligence to increase efficiency and reduce cost in evaluating reservoirs.

Perhaps it’s a case of “when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” syndrome, but three of these four trends involve proppants. This is a company specialty, which it practices through its Stim Lab group. Here, finally, we arrive at today’s topic. Unlike a straight-ahead commercial enterprise, the Stim Lab Proppant Consortium is just that—a consortium. Composed of more than fifty (at last count) companies, it tracks the definition perfectly: an association of two or more…organizations…with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for achieving a common goal. In this case, it certainly gives the “core” team a deep bench of bright people.

In existence since 1986, the group has an ambitious objective. It seeks to characterize all commercially available proppants used in oil and gas well fracture stimulation. The consortium has set long-term industry standards for proppant testing, and it seeks to study:

• Baseline conductivity of proppants vs. type, size, concentration, embedment, closure, and temperature;
• Sand and resin-coated sand ceramics;
• Resin-coated ceramics;
• Leakoff and conductivity of proppants with frac fluids;
• Multi-phase and non-Darcy testing for both oil and gas flow; and
• Software for predicting conductivity, cleanup, and productivity following hydraulic fracturing.

Production prediction simulator. Speaking of software, Predict-K is the group’s production prediction simulator. Based on consortium testing (and only available to consortium members, it should be noted) the company says the software allows realistic production prediction with a standalone application simulator.

Based on findings from nearly two decades of study, the simulator supports realistic post-frac production prediction by helping engineers systematically evaluate the effects of proppant type and concentration, proppant embedment, non-Darcy flow, multi-phase flow, and gel cleanup. The simulator provides a comprehensive database of the physical and performance characteristics of sand and specialty proppants.

Users can even avail themselves of the “Tip of the Month” (found on the company’s website). A random sampling suggests a series of far-from-fluffy nuggets of useful advice.

The program models the behavior of a proppant pack under flowing and downhole conditions. It uses three workflows to evaluate different level of complexity in proppant-pack behavior. First, baseline analysis compares proppant performance under the influence of stress and time. Second, dynamic analysis extends the baseline analysis to reservoir conditions by including the effects of fracturing fluid and non-Darcy and multi-phase flow. The third workflow—production analysis—does several interesting things:

• Uses hydraulic fracture design results from any commercially available fracture simulator to compare various completion strategies and predict well production.
• Finds the optimum completion techniques related to proppant and fluid selection, stage and well spacing, treatment size and rate, and proppant concentration.
• Matches historical production to calibrate the model for future optimizations.
• Uses effective fracture length and fracture conductivity from Predict-K as inputs into the reservoir model.

The tool accesses a related proppant testing database, which contains more than 800 baseline tests, on more than 90 proppants including sands, ceramics, and resin-coated proppants, in sizes from 12/20 to 100 mesh. Non-Darcy test data is also available for many products.

Outside the consortium’s activities, the company is up to other related, if esoteric, activities that space prevents describing. Even though it says its products and services “…focus on maximizing incremental daily production rates and ultimate recovery rates to maximize [ROI],” the company also said this, in a recent presentation: “The decline curve will always win.”

Maybe so, but the efforts of organizations like this one will have something to say about the shape of it.