Advancements in Completion Technology Increase Production in the Williston Basin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 159586, ’Advancements in Openhole-Completion Technology Increase Efficiencies and Production in the Williston Basin,’ by John Paneitz, Whiting Petroleum, and C. Christopher Johnson, Matthew White, and George Gentry, Baker Hughes, prepared for the 2012 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, San Antonio, Texas, USA, 8-10 October. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Over the years, hybrid systems have been installed in horizontal wellbores to increase the number of compartmental sections for hydraulic fracturing because of the limitations of ball-actuated fracture sleeves. Experimenting with hybrid systems provides operators with the ability to optimize spacing of fracture stages along the horizontal section when sleeve technology alone does not allow for the desired number of stages. The costs are higher for operators to perform a hybrid-type completion, however, and this has driven enhanced sleeve technology to allow for all-sleeve completions. Introduction The Bakken shale located in the Williston basin covers an area that includes portions of North Dakota and Montana in the US and Manitoba and Saskatchewan in Canada (Fig. 1). An unconventional reservoir, the Bakken formation is one of the last giants to be discovered in North America. The US Geological Service estimates that the undiscovered US portion of the Bakken formation holds 3.65 billion bbl of oil, 1.85 Tcf of associated gas, and 148 million bbl of natural-gas liquids. Advances in horizontal drilling of extended-reach wells and in completion techniques have increased the amount of recoverable oil and gas. Wells drilled in the Bakken are typically drilled horizontally across two 640-acre sections, with laterals that can extend more than 9,000 ft. Two completion methods known for cost-effectiveness and high well efficiency that are used in these wells are the openhole-packer system and the sleeve one-trip system. Openhole-Packer and Sleeve Completions Openhole completions performed in the Bakken are commonly run as a one-trip system on drillpipe containing the following equipment: a hydraulic or mechanical running tool, liner-top packer or liner-hanger system, openhole packers, fracture sleeves, and float equipment. Once the system is in position, the appropriate fluid is displaced, and the liner-top-packer is set; the running tool is dis-connected from the system and removed from the well. The openhole packers pro-vide compartmental isolation along the horizontal wellbore with fracture sleeves placed at each stage, forming a pathway for stimulation fluid and the production of hydrocarbons.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".