Overview of Stimulation Technology for Horizontal Completions without Cemented Casing in the Lateral
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Many horizontal wells have been drilled in low- to moderate-permeability formations and completed in a manner that assumed there would not be a need for a true "stimulation" treatment. This has been a widespread occurrence in both the U.S.A. and Canada, and to a lesser extent for other locations around the globe. Completing the horizontal section either openhole or with a noncemented liner is economically attractive. However, in many low-permeability reservoirs, and some with moderate-permeability values, production has often been below expectations and sometimes commercially unfeasible, even following efforts to overcome near-wellbore damage problems. This is especially true when considering only completions in reservoirs other than fractured chalks. In more permeable reservoirs, the higher investment costs of underbalanced drilling have often allowed low-damage completions with good economic return. In lower permeability reservoirs, this approach has not often been successful. Previous studies offer numerous success stories for stimulating cased/cemented horizontal completions in low-permeability reservoirs.1-8 To achieve proper stimulation with a technique such as fracture-acidizing or hydraulic fracturing with proppants, operators must incorporate an economical, effective method for controlling fluid or proppant placement. However, operators faced with limited producing potential need to reduce well costs, so they often consider openhole or simple liner completions a necessity. Unfortunately, few proven technologies exist for controlling fracture placement in noncemented wellbores. In some cases, high risk or very high cost is associated with these technologies, depending on reservoir conditions or the potential for production improvement. In attempting to solve these problems, operators have used several approaches. Some have succeeded both mechanically and economically; some have only been mechanical successes, while others have fallen short on both considerations. To achieve significant long-term production improvement, conventional proppant-laden fracturing treatments, waterfracs (those using very little proppant), and fracture-acidizing of carbonate formations all need some type of control over fracture placement along the horizontal. This paper examines several approaches used in attempting to solve these problems and analyzes the reasons why each succeeded or failed mechanically and/or economically.
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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".