Natural Proppants for Hydraulic Fracture Production Optimization in Eagle Ford Shale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Proppants are essential to the success of most hydraulic fractures and often account for a significant portion of the cost of the treatment. Both the mass of proppant and the selection of the right type of proppant are critical elements in gaining the highest Net Present Value (NPV). It has been generally believed that in a lower closure stress environment (below 6,000 psi, i.e., shallow reservoirs), natural sands such as Brady and Ottawa types are appropriate as proppants and, for the same mesh size, they provide essentially the same permeability. Commonly accepted notion is that manmade proppants (such as ceramics) should be applied at higher closure stress environment, invariably deeper reservoirs. According to the characteristics of Eagle Ford shale, which include the rock stiffness, exemplified by Young's Modulus, stress anisotropy or isotropy and the existence of a natural fracture network, this study presents fracture designs based on three types of proppants for both shale formations: Brady sand, Ottawa sand and man-made ceramic. Permeability tests and crush tests under certain pressure ranges are done to determine experimentally the dimensioned fracture conductivity. Although natural proppants may exhibit lower permeability, a fracture optimization p-3D model is used to remedy the lower proppant permeability and maximize well performance by optimizing fracture geometry, including fracture half length, width and height. Reduced proppant pack permeability is compensated by larger width. Non-Darcy effects in the fracture are also considered for gas reservoirs. Post-treatment well performance is then estimated, using the optimized well geometry, leading to cumulative production estimates over the well life. Finally, a NPV analysis is employed as the criterion to select the best proppant for the job. In this study, we show there is an optimum Proppant Number corresponding to maximum NPV for various reservoir permeabilities. Based on that notion, we propose a systematic way of choosing proppant type and mass to maximize NPV in oil reservoirs. For tight gas reservoirs, we correct the prejudice that natural sand proppants cannot be applied to deeper reservoirs by showing NPV study results that are superior to those of manmade proppants. By keeping stimulation costs down, natural sand proppants have a much larger range of applicability than previously thought.
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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".