Unlocking Tight Oil: Multistage Horizontal Well Fracturing in Unconventional Reservoir, a Successful UAE Case History

Tight Oil Unconventional Reservoirs are challenging when it comes to development and enhancement of production. Transverse Multistage Hydraulic fracturing technique is widely used to maximize production from unconventional reservoirs, however it can be quite challenging when it comes down to execution across longer Tight Oil Horizontal laterals. The paper describes in full the various aspect of technical and operational planning in order to successfully execute highest number of Frac Stages in a well in UAE across a lateral length of 5300 ft This paper will describe an Integrated Field development Study that included building of Geomechanical Model for in-situ stress characterization and rock elastic properties for 3D Hydraulic Fracture Modelling. The fully 3D Hydraulic Fracture model assisted in geometrically spacing, finalizing and optimizing the number of Frac Stages across the horizontal Lateral. In order to optimize the design, specialized cores studies were conducted as part of the process such as Steady State measurements of permeability. In this paper the testing part will be describe in full and how the study was incorporated in the state-of-art Frac Simulator to ensure optimized frac design and realistic deliverable. The paper focusses on the operation planning, execution and efficiency. This includes frac stages execution, pump down plug and perf, number of cluster optimization & cluster spacing, milling, cleanout and flowback. Also in order to quantify the contribution from each stage, tracer services was utilized which will be detailed in the paper. Finally the paper will also cover the Well Testing strategy, which is one of the crucial aspect of the well deliverability. API Lab and Composition Analysis of Oil & Gas Samples were also conducted post fracturing as part of the study. The overall planning and execution of this well will become a guide and will be utilized for future well and frac design, which will be discussed in the paper. This integrated approach will be utilized in planning and designing future wells. The post fracturing data and production data collected from the well will help in further Frac Stage optimization which will lead to overall cost optimization