Montney Unconventional Gas: An Integrated Approach To Optimizing Wellbore Completions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article, written by Assistant Technology Editor Karen Bybee, contains highlights of paper SPE 125970, ’Montney Unconventional Gas - Next Generation, An Integrated Approach To Optimizing Wellbore Completions Technology,’ by Rodney Schnell, SPE, Nicole Tapper, SPE, and Ryan Genyk, SPE, Talisman Energy, and Dalis Deliu, SPE, and Habib Tavakol, SPE, Halliburton, originally prepared for the 2009 SPE Eastern Regional Meeting, Charleston, West Virginia, 23-25 September. The paper has not been peer reviewed. The full-length paper presents the evolution of well construction in the Montney play, technical and economic challenges, and the new synergy developed between drilling and completions. Introduction The Montney formation is a prolific tight gas reservoir in the western Canadian sedimentary basin, in both Alberta and British Columbia. In the Peace River Arch area, horizontal wells with multiple fractures are the key to achieving economic success. Using various area drilling and completion techniques as a starting point, lowering the installation cost without affecting the completion or production results was the driver for the next generation of completions. Swellable-packer systems with ball-drop-actuated sliding sleeves initially were run in various openhole configurations to allow multiple fracture treatments to be pumped in one operation, a significant savings from multiple-day operations. From these successes, a drive to reduce costs further led to cemented ball-drop sliding sleeves with a hydraulic-fracture-initiator sleeve at the toe of the horizontal well. After installing the cemented sleeves on eight horizontal wells and improving the process continuously, it has been concluded that the system can reduce drilling and completion costs by 25% when compared to swellable-packer systems with intermediate casing and by 50% over traditional cemented liners with perforated completions. These savings are accomplished without affecting well performance negatively. Background Swellable Packers. To stimulate the Montney reservoir effectively with multiple fractures, it was necessary to isolate each interval. As a potential improvement to cementing a liner in place and perforating individual intervals, swellable packers were used with sliding sleeves between the packers. The sleeves were actuated using a ball-drop mechanism to isolate the portion of the wellbore that had been fracture stimulated previously. Once isolated, the next interval is accessed when hydraulic pressure from the pumping units opens the next sleeve. The speed of the completion operations with the swellable packers and ball-drop system is very efficient. It is quite easy for the operator to achieve seven fracture stimulations in 1 day, and there were no problems encountered initiating fractures into the open hole between the swellable packers. Production Results. Microseismic data show very good coverage of the Montney formation and show that the swellable packers were able to pro-vide adequate isolation consistently between fractures.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".