60 Years of Multi-Fractured Vertical, Deviated and Horizontal Wells: What Have We Learned?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Multiple fracture placements in single wells have a sixty year history with first applications soon after hydraulic fracturing was patented. Fracturing technology has been applied to offshore deviated wells, sand control wells, tight gas, coal, chalks, shales and conglomerates in turn as "conventional" reservoir limits were reached and each "new unconventional" reservoir was encountered. As fracturing technology was adapted to make an "unconventional" reservoir into a conventional reservoir, the adaptations and evolutions needed became part of the technology tool box waiting for the next challenge. Each innovation improved and stretched the reach of completions and production engineering as new findings were incorporated to monitor, model, optimize and extend the ranges of fracturing use for high and low temperatures, high stress formations and a variety of other challenges. This review looks at the development of multi-fractured wells from its first application in vertical wells where one well could now do the task of three wells, to the first modern application of highly multi-fractured horizontal wells used in chalks, shales and tight oil and gas reservoirs. The technical focus is on the learning procession covering details of casing wear, cyclic pressure application, isolation mechanisms, perforation placement, well spacing and fracture spacing. The technical literature and field learnings have both been searched for applicable information with a surprising variety of engineering application details brought forth that are useful in optimizing a single well or a whole development.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".