Quantitative Risk Management Improves the Success Rate of Micro-Hydraulic Fracturing Stress Tests

We applied a recently introduced method to complete a feasibility assessment and design a stress testing campaign in a deep-water field in West Africa. We first reviewed the previous—and unsuccessful—campaign. Test data were inverted together with a priori knowledge from an independent geomechanical study to develop an understanding of the ambient conditions. Based on this understanding, the current campaign's chance of success (COS) was estimated to be 10%, with 1,000 psi of pressure capacity lacking to reach 95%. By analyzing the sensitivity of the risk to formation properties and design parameters, we identified various options to prevent this high, yet seemingly controllable, risk of test failure. Among them, a 1.7-ppg increase of mud density, expected to increase the COS to 80%, was deemed most effective and implemented. With 4 successful tests out of 10, the second campaign was more successful than the previous one. Yet this success rate was lower than anticipated. We inverted the second campaign's test data to revise our understanding of the in situ conditions. Our main findings are that, for this particular case, (i) the magnitude of the minimum horizontal stress was significantly higher than initially thought, (ii) the minimum horizontal stress and the horizontal stress ratio appeared to be anticorrelated, and (iii) the COS was extremely sensitive to the minimum horizontal stress. The conditions solved using the second campaign's dataset also explained the first campaign's negative outcome. This case study demonstrates that (i) the proposed planning method enables return of experience to be captured and leveraged from one test, or one series of tests, to the next, and the design of formation stress tests to be optimized, leading to an improved success rate of formation stress tests; and (ii) the proposed inversion scheme allows insight to be gained from both successful and unsuccessful tests, including in formation conditions other than the minimum horizontal stress.