Cemented Ball-Activated Sliding Sleeves Improve Well Economics and Efficiency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper examines the effectiveness of a completion technique where ball-activated sliding sleeves (BASS) are cemented into the wellbore. This technique allows operators to change zones between fracture-stimulation treatments by dropping balls from surface, instead of using the conventional pumpdown plug and perforating method. A five-well group completed with this method is compared to its direct offsets that were completed conventionally to draw conclusions. Initial studies show that this completion method reduces the time and cost to complete a horizontal well while yielding production that is equivalent to or better than the offset wells. Preliminary research shows that the BASS group average 30-day Initial Production (IP) was approximately 25% better than the offset well average, and that the 9-month IP was approximately 33% better than the offset well average. Using the ball-drop completion technique, production increases were accompanied by faster completion times, a reduction in required hydraulic horsepower (HHP), and substantial cost savings. On average, wells that were completed using the cemented BASS showed no cost increase during the drilling phase, and reduced the mechanical completion cost by $20,000 to $40,000 per well when compared to offset wells. The primary efficiency driver during completion is the ability to prepare the well for fracture stimulation and complete multiple stages of fracture stimulation without having to utilize a workover unit. Additional time savings occurs between fracture-stimulation treatments; this method reduces downtime between stages from 3 hours to 20 minutes. This time savings can lead to more efficient use of equipment, which benefits the operator and the pumping company and improves community relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".