The Quest for Improved Proppant Placement: Investigation of the Effects of Proppant Slurry Component Properties on Transport
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Beyond the initial fracture propagation, the primary function of fracturing fluids is to provide the means and media for the transport and placement of a conductive proppant pack in the created fracture such that resident hydrocarbons may be more easily produced. That is after all, the objective of hydraulic fracture stimulation. Fracturing fluids have undergone great scrutiny in recent years, leading to significant effort and expense expended in the quest to develop the "perfect" system. Historically, these efforts have been akin to the proverbial dog chasing his tail, rather than on addressing the engineering objective of the designated location of a conductive propped fracture. Primary development focus has been on optimization of fluid rheological stability to get the treatment "in the hole" and then, secondarily, on mitigating the damage caused by "new and improved" fluid system. Unfortunately, post-stimulation production analysis frequently demonstrates effective fracture area far less than that designed, suggesting either that the proppant-pack is damaged far more than expected or that the proppant was not placed in designated areal location. The latter could be due to inadequacies in terms of the lateral transport away from the wellbore (length) and/or in vertically covering the productive interval (height). Many low permeability reservoirs are now experiencing a renaissance in the application of high rate slickwater fracs. The slickwater treatments are typically designed for long fracture lengths even though such fluids are thought to have inherently poor proppant transport abilities, hence the high rate. Recent testing was conducted in a large-scale slot apparatus to evaluate the relative effects of proppant slurry component characteristics and the proppant transport capability. The effects of various fluid specific gravity, fluid viscosity, proppant specific gravity, proppant size, slurry flow rate, and slot width were investigated. Testing included fluids from slickwater to gelled, weighted brines, proppants from 40/70 Ottawa sand to 14/30 ultra-lightweight proppants, pump rates from 0.1 to 1.0 bbl/ft/min, and slot widths from 0.25 to 0.5 inch. This paper will provide evaluation of the proppant transport testing data and discuss the comparative abilities of current fracturing slurry system technologies to achieve placement of a productive propped fracture.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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".