First Successful Proppant Fracture for Unconventional Carbonate Source Rock in Saudi Arabia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Widely recognized as the world leader in crude oil production, Saudi Aramco has only recently begun to explore for unconventional gas resources. Saudi Aramco started evaluating its unconventional reservoirs to meet the anticipated future demands for natural gas. One of the subject plays that is currently being evaluated is a carbonate source rock with nanodarcy permeability and very low porosity. The target formation has few, if any, analogs that can be used for comparison. Knowledge of the formation characteristics, geomechanics, stimulation response and production potential has been nonexistent until recently. Historically, all attempts to hydraulically fracture stimulate carbonate formations in Kingdom have resulted in premature screen-outs. This paper will discuss the hydraulic fracturing stimulation design, execution and evaluation of the first successful proppant fracturing treatment in an unconventional carbonate source rock in Saudi Arabia. The successful two-stage treatment proved that proppant fracturing techniques could be utilized to stimulate carbonate formations after modifying the stimulation design, specifically the perforation strategy, fracturing fluids and proppant type. The Tuwaiq Mountain and Jubailah formations were treated with 104,000 lbs and 114,956 lbs of proppant respectively. INTRODUCTION Saudi Aramco's unconventional gas exploration efforts were influenced by the growing local gas demand and the economic success of shale exploration in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. Saudi Aramco started evaluating its unconventional reservoirs and their potential to reduce oil consumption in the electricity sector and to fuel the anticipated future demands for natural gas. "The multi-stage fracturing technique has facilitated the development of shale gas and light tight oil production in the United States and is believed to do so in the other countries with unconventional hydrocarbon resources" (1). Saudi Aramco has embarked on an unconventional exploration and appraisal project to assess its unconventional resources potential in three geographic areas, Northwest, South Ghawar and East Ghawar. Hydraulic fracturing techniques will be utilized to enhance production by connecting natural fissures and creating high connectivity pathways for gas to flow into the well.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".