Chapter 1 - Introduction to the Course and a Brief History of Fracturing

01-01 - Hydraulic Fracturing Market (18 min.) Sample Lesson
01-02 - Course Objectives (12 min.)
01-03 - What is Hydraulic Fracturing (20 min.)

Chapter 2 - Equipment and Operations

02-01 - First Experimental and First Commercial Frac Treatments (27 min.)
02-02 - Treating Iron (21 min.)

Chapter 3 - Stresses and Conductivity

03-01 - The Many Stresses/Pressures Experienced in Fracturing (11 min.)
03-02 - Stress Magnitude (14 min.)
03-03 - Effect of Geologic Structures (8 min.)
03-04 - Stress Logs and Borehole Breakouts (17 min.)
03-05 - Stress Azimuth Effects (13 min.)
03-06 - Stress Measurement (8 min.)

Chapter 4 - Reservoir Response, Post Frac Production, and the Effect of Transient Flow

04-01 - Variables Affecting Post -Frac Productivity (26 min.)
04-02 - Folds of Increase for Acid Fracturing (15 min.)

Chapter 5 - Fracture Geometry Basic and the Major Fracture Design Variables

05-01 - Frac School No. 1 (9 min.)
05-02 - Fracture Design Variables (3 min.)

Chapter 6 - Fracture Design Variables (HECKµQ)

06-01 - Fracture Fluid Selection (14 min.)
06-02 - Fracture Theory: Material Balance (14 min.)
06-03 - Net Pressure (6 min.)
06-04 - Fracture Toughness (9 min.)
06-05 - Height Growth (9 min.)
06-06 - Fracture Simulation: Input Variables Example (7 min.)
06-07 - Frac Design Using Spreadsheet (17 min.)

Chapter 7 - Treatment Design Options

07-01 - Fracture Design Variables (29 min.)
07-02 - Fracture Geometry (5 min.)
07-03 - Modulus (16 min.)
07-04 - Estimating Youngs Modulus (7 min.)
07-05 - Fluid Loss Mechanisms (26 min.)
07-06 - Fluid Loss Estimate Ct and Spurt loss (6 min.)
07-07 - Fracture Toughness (6 min.)
07-08 - Fluid Viscosity (20 min.)
07-09 - Apparent Viscosity (2 min.)
07-10 - Pump Rate (10 min.)
07-11 - Preliminary Design (7 min.)

Chapter 8 - Fracture Closure Stress & Pressure Decline Analysis

08-01 - In-Situ Stress Testing Methods (14 min.)
08-02 - Micro-Frac Stress Tests (26 min.)
08-03 - Flowback Tests (27 min.)
08-04 - Frac School No. 1 Examples (13 min.)

Chapter 9 - Minifrac Pressure Decline Analysis

09-01 - Bottomhole Treating Pressure (17 min.)
09-02 - Nolte-Smith Diagnostic Log-Log Net Pressure Plot (18 min.)
09-03 - Nolte-Smith Field Examples (3 min.)
09-04 - Interpreting Shut-In Pressure Decline (12 min.)
09-05 - Exercise Using Fracschool 1 and Spreadsheet (22 min.)
09-06 - Minifrac Pressure Decline Analysis (11 min.)

Chapter 10 - Proppant Selection

10-01 - Importance of Conductivity (25 min.)
10-02 - Proppant Types (8 min.)
10-03 - Proppant Usage and API Standards (11 min.)
10-04 - Natural Frac Sands (25 min.)

Chapter 11 - Fluid Chemistry and Selection

11-01 - Frac Fluid Chemistry (16 min.)
11-02 - Guar & Guar Based Derivatives (22 min.)
11-03 - Other Gellant Chemical Structures (14 min.)
11-04 - Breakers (20 min.)
11-05 - Clay Control Agents (15 min.)

Chapter 12 - Fracturing Techniques, Tools & Diagnostics

12-01 - Proppant Distribution & Placement (19 min.)
12-02 - TSO Designs (12 min.)
12-03 - Temperature Logs (9 min.)
12-04 - RA Logs (19 min.)
12-05 - Seismic Monitoring & Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing (24 min.)
12-06 - Chemical Tracers (6 min.)

Chapter 13 - Perforating and Perforation Strategies

13-01 - Normal Perforating Gun Questions (15 min.)
13-02 - Multiple Intervals (Limited Entry) (9 min.)

Chapter 14 - Big Problem No. 1

14-01 - Big Problem - Part 1 (17 min.)
14-02 - Big Problem - Part 2 (20 min.)
14-03 - Quality Control & Safety (14 min.)
14-04 - Environmental Stewardship (39 min.)
14-05 - Post-Frac (5 min.)
14-06 - Fracturing Safety (6 min.) Quiz: 14-06 - Fracturing Safety

Hydraulic Fracturing / Chapter 1 - Introduction to the Course and a Brief History of Fracturing

Lesson 01-01 - Hydraulic Fracturing Market

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Transcript

Good morning, everyone. We're here to start a week discussion on hydraulic fracturing, prop fracturing. Maybe we'll spend five minutes on acid fracturing but this is primarily about prop fractured. And start out with some pictures. On the left there we see a vertical prop fracture. This is along a fjord in Norway, near Stavanger, Norway. And if we could zoom in there. See a young lady out there and I've been there and the best I could do was lay on my stomach and peek over the edge. So that young lady is very brave. And then we have a horizontal prop fracture and finally just a picture. I have worked on wells in New Zealand and Brazil where we drill from onshore to an offshore location. I've never heard of anyone drilling from an offshore to an onshore application. But crop fracturing is very common in offshore environments anymore and not just for the frac packs in high permeability sands. More and more lower permeability formations are being developed offshore, although lower meaning two to five millidarsies, not microdarsies. But there's lots of fractures in the world. Natural fractures, of course, very common in some formations. Here we see an outcrop. You see a lot of vertical natural fractures. And in core, we see different types of natural fracturs. One I find kind of interesting is the bottom right there. It's labeled compacted. I'm not sure what compacted means, but not sure how you generate a natural fracture with that kind of curvature to it. But I presume it's some sort of shear fracture. But you also see in the top right, some horizontal natural fracturing, bedding plane parallel natural fractures. And natural fractured can play a big role in hydraulic fracturing. They put a real monkey wrench into hydraulic fractured. It changes the fluid loss. It may create a complex fracturing hydraulic fracturing, prop fracturing and natural fractures do not coexist well. Although in some formations, the combination is crucial to the production. The Barnett shale, the first unconventional formation, highly natural fractured in the combination of prop fractured and the natural fracture system was crucial to development of that formation. Looked at hydraulic fracturing international and offshore. And we can see the dollars increasing from 2020 there to 2025, nearly more than doubling. Primarily Slumberjay and Halliburton and then other, although now Liberty would be larger than SlumberJay. They took over Slumberjay's North American operations. U.S. Land market. Again, we see the dollars peak in there in around 2022 and then declining a little over the next years. Globally, by service company, we can see Halliburton and then Liberty and then other Schlumberger, other companies, Schlumbergers down around fourth or fifth there. So a lot of service companies, although the top four or five really dominate the market. Going back to the US. Look at active frac spread. So it peaked around 2018, 2019, 2020. COVID came along and everything crashed and it's slowly recovering. Although I don't know current numbers but it's nowhere near its peak. Part of that is efficiency. Where they have one frac spread working on two or even three different well heads, and they simply switch from one to another to another, so they're pumping virtually continuously. So they've done a lot more fracs with fewer fleets. Just like drilling, the rig count has never recovered, but the footage drilled is increasing just a tremendous gains in efficiency. That'd be an interesting statistic to have actually. This is just looking at the U.S. Market by quarter from the different farmations dominated by the Permian Basin, South Texas, the Eagleford and other farmations. Again, we see things crash in there with COVID and then recovering. Look at a spending distribution, you know, frac is the dominant one, but water is a huge market. It's a huge, huge cost for urban reporting, so the spending distribution is split among a lot of different items there. Average water use for horizontal gas wells up in the millions of gallons. Horizontal oil, a little bit less. And then vertical wells, much, much less. Of course, vertical wells typically only have one or two stimulation treatments where horizontal well may have 30 stimulation treatments. Another big change in recent years, and this is for 2021, is pad drilling, where we see multiple wells drill from pads, with dominantly two, three, or four wells drill from a single pad. And again, that's contributing to the efficiencies in drilling that have been developed. Looking at the frac spin for a typical Permian well, a Wolfcat well, sea trucking, pumping service there, about 1.7 million. Where is the sand? Sands, three million dollars. So sand is the primary cost for an unconventional frac job. And that's why you've seen people switch to using local sands, which traditionally would have been considered really trash and compared to the Northern Ottawa white sands they are really poor stuff. But still the cost factor is so big for the unconventionals where nearly half of the spend is on the sand, which is always been very surprising to me. Change in completion strategy. I find this interesting. Lateral lengths increase 50%. Stages have nearly doubled. Perth cluster per stage is more than doubled. Where is propped mass per lateral foot? Has nearly tripled. Propped mass is nearly quadrupled. And yet actually, 306-day cumulative oil equivalent has only gone up 28%. So obviously, sand's a major cost and it's nearly quadruple, but it's only given us 28% better production. Me, that implies something about our design process. We're not getting the benefit from quadrupling the cost of our frac jobs. And only getting a 20% increase in production. So I think there's a lot of room for improvement in frac design for the unconventionals. Average lateral length is increased and increased and increased to, I don't know, ridiculous extremes. Now they're drilling some U-shaped wells where they drill. 10,000 feet north and then they make a big U-turn and drill 10,00 feet south. And okay, I'm impressed that the drillers can do it. The biggest change I've seen in drilling in my career when I first got involved in completions and fracturing, drillers only knew one word. Now you tell them you want to drill figure eights and they'll just sit down. Okay, this is what it'll cost. And we'll do it. Just a total mindset change in drilling that has fueled the unconventional development. This is looking at some data for Perforate, you know, refraction, masking, poor completion efficiencies. Ten clusters per stage, three perforations per cluster. The darker colored perforation use microproppants. And maybe the micropropants are giving us some preferential distribution. Based on perforational erosion, we see what appears to be much better. A distribution of the propid, you know, if we look at, I'm having a hard time reading the number, but number 20 there, the first perf cluster looks like it took most of the Xan. We had a runaway frac there. If we get a run away frac, then it erodes the perf more, it goes more there, which erodes perf more. And the micropropid may be doing some preferential erosion or breakdown. Possibly improve, and these are the kind of things I think we need to look at. Why have our masses of profit not improved production? Well, if the masses of profit are all going into one stage, you wouldn't expect a major improvement in production. And so I think there's a lot we need to learn about our completion of these unconventional wells. Next, what is it that a frac engineer does? Well, if any of you have worked offshore, you do a lot of this, hurry up and wait. Oil industry people are not very expensive and time is very expensive. So that looks like a frac engineer working offshore. And then once you're through with your fracturing, this is a picture of Jim Abel, I worked with a little bit on the NARS slope. And this is what he does in his off time, is build crazy motorcycles. Haven't seen Jim in a while. I don't know if he's still driving motorcycles or not. And this is my partner, Carl Montgomery, who you'll be meeting later. And Carl is a dinner table entertainer, hanging spoons. And I'm not quite sure how he does it. I've tried it once or twice and it doesn't work. So he must have electrostatic oil in his skin or something. What did we should do? Our primary objective is of course to maximize productivity, produce as the design flow rates are better and longevity. We mentioned earlier that refracts are a mask for poor completions. We need to consider, you know, will acid fraction work at this stress or will the stresses close the acid edge frac As we draw down the reservoir, put more and more stress on our profit, will it crush and we'll have to do refrax. So we need to plan for the life of the well to minimize workovers. And basically economics. Fracturing is an economics process. I can drill one well or I can draw two wells or I could drill one and frack it. I can do a bigger frac. There's really not a good technical answer to frac design. It is an economics process. All we're doing is increasing rate. We're not manufacturing oil or gas. Our objective for this course is to look at the underlying physics, provide an understanding of the design. Production performance, evaluation, and operational execution of hydraulic fracturing. But we wanna do that within an integrated concept of fracturing design. I've been assigned the task of fractured this well, blah, blah, where do I start? What do I do? What do do I first? And what do I second, et cetera? And we want to look at a logical step-by-step approach, looking at the underlying physics, what data is important, where do I get that data, and how do I apply that to my Frac designs. And we'll try to work through some design examples as we go. Outline, we're doing the introduction now. And really not in there, Carl will come along and talk about one part of fracturing, the operations. Then we'll get into some geomechanics and talk rock stresses. We'll pretend to be production reservoir engineers for a while, talk about post-fract production. Then get into fracture geometry. What are the major design variables in fracturing? Fracture height, the modulus, fluid loss, fluid viscosity, pump rate, all culminating in building a treatment schedule. Actually, selecting propant and fluid types is part of this design process. But we're gonna pull that out and talk about these fracture materials separately. And then we will look at other ancillary topics, perforating for fracture and treatment execution, et cetera. If anything, Treatment execution gets a little bit short shrift in this course. We'll talk in a minute about the tripod of fracturing design and operations is one of the legs. And it's really the major leg. If you can't do it in the field the way it's designed, all your theory and design work is not worth much. And so, you know, we could spend half the week on that, but unfortunately time doesn't allow that. So my name is Mike Smith. I'm president of NSI technology. We're a small engineering firm, specialized in hydraulic fracturing engineering and software and training. Background, I went to Rice University in Houston as a mechanical engineer. I would love to design the down hole tools for frac packing. To me, that's a dream job for a mechanical engineering. But that's not what life dealt me. Spent some time in the US Army. And so we'll be following the US army training techniques here, we're gonna tell you what we're going to tell you, then we're go to tell ya, and then we gonna tell ya what we told you. So you'll have three chances. Back to Rice University again. And 36 years, unfortunately, is a little out of date. The years keep adding up. I'm giving a talk here in Calgary this week on the Wattenberg story, which is coming on 50 years ago. So a little bit of a history lesson. We may have time to go through that case history later. Did a lot of work in the North Sea and various other outside work. Tennis, no more. COVID and knees, put an end to that. And water skiing, no, more at all. But I still do swim with my Labrador puppy.