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PNAS 2013 Patzek 19731 6 - 2
PNAS 2013 Patzek 19731 6 - 2
PNAS 2013 Patzek 19731 6 - 2
Edited by Michael Celia, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and accepted by the Editorial Board October 2, 2013 (received for review July 17, 2013)
hydrofracturing
from innite or semiinnite regions to pipes or planes. The resulting decline curves do not apply to the wells we describe here.
The geometry of horizontal wells in gas-rich mudrocks is quite
different from the conguration that has guided intuition for the
past century. The mudrock formations are thin layers, on the
order of 3090 m thick, lying at characteristic depths of 2 km
or more and extending over areas of thousands of square kilometers. Wells that access these deposits drop vertically from the
surface of the earth and then turn so as to extend horizontally
within the mudrock for 18 km. The mudrock layers have such
low natural permeability that they have trapped gas for millions
of years, and this gas becomes accessible only after an elaborate
process that involves drilling horizontal wells, fracturing the rock
with pressurized water, and propping the fractures open with
sand. Gas seeps from the region between each two consecutive
fractures into the highly permeable fracture planes and into the
wellbore, and it is rapidly produced from there.
The simplest model of horizontal wells consistent with this
setting is a cuboid region within which gas can diffuse to a set of
parallel planar boundaries. Fig. 1 illustrates the well as 1020
hydrofractures that are H 30m high and 2L 200m long,
spaced at distances of around 2d 100m. The fact that this is the
right starting point for these wells was recognized by Al-Ahmadi
et al. (9), and the diffusion problem in this setting has been
studied by both Silin and Kneafsy (10), and Nobakht et al. (11).
Examining Fig. 1 helps one to understand how gas production
evolves. When a well is drilled and completed, the ow of gas is
complicated and difcult to predict, particularly because the
water used to create it is back-produced. In practice, the resulting
initial transients last around 3 mo. After that time, gas should
enter a phase where it ows into the fracture planes as if coming
from a semiinnite region.
Signicance
Ten years ago, US natural gas cost 50% more than that from
Russia. Now, it is threefold less. US gas prices plummeted because of the shale gas revolution. However, a key question
remains: At what rate will the new hydrofractured horizontal
wells in shales continue to produce gas? We analyze the simplest model of gas production consistent with basic physics of
the extraction process. Its exact solution produces a nearly
universal scaling law for gas wells in each shale play, where
production rst declines as 1 over the square root of time and
then exponentially. The result is a surprisingly accurate description of gas extraction from thousands of wells in the
United States oldest shale play, the Barnett Shale.
Author contributions: T.W.P., F.M., and M.M. designed research, performed research,
analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. M.C. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial
Board.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
See Commentary on page 19660.
1
ENGINEERING
Natural gas from tight shale formations will provide the United
States with a major source of energy over the next several decades.
Estimates of gas production from these formations have mainly
relied on formulas designed for wells with a different geometry.
We consider the simplest model of gas production consistent
with the basic physics and geometry of the extraction process. In
principle, solutions of the model depend upon many parameters,
but in practice and within a given gas eld, all but two can be xed
at typical values, leading to a nonlinear diffusion problem we solve
exactly with a scaling curve. The scaling curve production rate
declines as 1 over the square root of time early on, and it later
declines exponentially. This simple model provides a surprisingly
accurate description of gas extraction from 8,294 wells in the
United States oldest shale play, the Barnett Shale. There is good
agreement with the scaling theory for 2,057 horizontal wells in
which production started to decline exponentially in less than
10 y. The remaining 6,237 horizontal wells in our analysis are too
young for us to predict when exponential decline will set in, but the
model can nevertheless be used to establish lower and upper
bounds on well lifetime. Finally, we obtain upper and lower bounds
on the gas that will be produced by the wells in our sample, individually and in total. The estimated ultimate recovery from our
sample of 8,294 wells is between 10 and 20 trillion standard
cubic feet.
Gas ows according to Darcys law through a system of microfractures, cracks, reopened natural fractures, faults, and failed
rock. This multiscale and loosely connected ow system is created by the high-rate hydrofracturing of shale rock. It is fed by the
rock matrix, where gas is stored (adsorbed) in very small pores.
It turns out that the gas effectively ows along paths that are
straight lines (hence, the setting is sometimes called linear
ow) perpendicular to the fracture planes. During the ow, the
initially high gas pressure diffuses toward the hydrofractures,
which are kept at a low pressure. This gas pressure diffusion
creates a gas production rate proportional to the inverse of the
square root of time on production.
At some point in time, gas ow causes the pressure along the
midplane between the hydrofractures to drop below the original
reservoir pressure, and gas production slows down relative to the
square-root-of-time behavior. We call the time when this happens the interference time. Eventually, the gas is so depleted
that the amount coming out per time is proportional to the
amount of gas remaining. This is the classic condition for exponential decay. Thus, after a long enough time, the rate of
production declines exponentially. The pressure-dependent
coefcient describing the diffusion of gas pressure is called the
hydraulic diffusivity of gas. Physically, it is unrelated to the
molecular diffusion coefcients.
The more closely spaced the hydrofractures are, the higher will
be the initial rate of gas production but the more quickly will the
interference time be reached. These intuitive considerations are
consistent with the mathematical results of Silin and Kneafsy
(10) and Nobakht et al. (11), and with the analysis that follows.
Results
Model. Hydraulic fracture in horizontal wells creates a network of
[1]
[3]
Next, let m be the cumulative production of gas mass from a horizontal well with N hydrofractures (Fig. 1), and let M be the
original mass of gas contained in the reservoir volume drained
by this well. The exact solution of the model for cumulative gas
production is given by a dimensionless recovery factor (RF):
RF ~t = m=M:
[4]
SEE COMMENTARY
Fig. 3. Comparison of 8,294 wells with scaling function. (A) Time history
of 2,057 wells in the Barnett Shale, scaled so as to t our scaling function
(initial reservoir pressure of 3,500 psi and well owing pressure of 500 psi),
for which the dimensionless time ~t starts below 0.25 and reaches 0.64 or
more. The burnt orange curves give the scaled production of each well,
and the black curve is the scaling function. Overall agreement is satisfactory. (B) Time history of 6,237 wells in the Barnett Shale for which the
scaled maximum time comes out as ~t max < 0:64 (burnt orange). These wells
are too young to trust our estimate of the interference time ; therefore,
we simply compare them with a square root function (black line). Time is
scaled by the maximum time tmax reached for each well, and production m
p
is scaled by K tmax .
Fig. 2. Cumulative production and production rate from scaling theory. (A)
Dimensionless RF RF~t vs. dimensionless time computed from the scaling
solution (black) compared with ve typical wells (burnt orange). The fracture
pressure pf is 500 psi, and the initial reservoir pressure pi is 3,500 psi. (B)
Dimensionless well production rate RF~t=~t vs. dimensionless time (black)
under the same conditions compared with the same ve typical wells (burnt
orange). Production rates of individual wells are noisy, although cumulative
production matches the scaling function well. Because the production rate
becomes linear on a semilog plot, production decline is exponential for
t= = ~t 1.
Patzek et al.
ENGINEERING
of productionphave
subsided, cumulative production takes the
Fig. 4. Values of interference time and gas in place M for the 2,057 wells
in Fig. 3A. Error bars indicate two standard uncertainties. Maximum interference times here are around 10 y due to the fact that wells more than
10 y old are still rare; interference times of, say, 30 y will only be reliably
detected when wells are 19 y old or more.
19734 | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1313380110
Discussion
p*
p dp
:
g Z g
[14]
SEE COMMENTARY
Zp
mp = 2
[15]
with
p =
g ug
h
i
Sg g + 1 a kg gas
=
3 ,
m s
t
[7]
where ug is the Darcy (supercial) velocity of gas, Sg = 1 Swc is gas saturation (with Swc being the connate water saturation), g is the free gas density,
a is the adsorbed gas density (kilograms of gas per cubic meter of solid), and
is the rock porosity.
By applying Darcys law to the linear, horizontal ow of gas, we can
substitute
k p
ug =
g x
g p
kg p
g p
Sg
+ 1 a
:
x g x
p t
g p t
[9]
m
= 0:
x x=d
Mg p
,
Zg RT
~t = t=;
~=
m
cg =
1 g
g p
T =const
1 1 Zg
:
=
p Zg p
[11]
a
g
:
[12]
T=const
[13]
Patzek et al.
d2
i
x~ = x=d
1
cg p g Zg =p2 mx,t:
i
2
[20]
Here, the subscript i refers to the quantities at the initial reservoir pressure
pi and temperature T.
Consider the linear ow of gas into a transverse planar hydrofracture
of height H and length 2L, and separated by distance 2d from the next
hydrofracture planes, as depicted in Fig. 1. The scaled transport equation is
~
~ 2 m
m
,
=
~t i ~
x2
~ x~,~t = 0 = m
~ i x~ ,
m
[10]
where Zg p,T,y is the compressibility factor of gas, Mg is the pseudomolecular mass of gas, R = 8,314:462 J/kmol-K is the universal gas constant, and
T is a constant temperature of the reservoir.
The isothermal compressibility of gas is dened as
[19]
The gas density is related to its pressure and temperature through an equation
of state for real gases:
g =
[18]
[8]
[17]
Methods
We begin with an expression for mass balance of gas owing in a porous rock:
[16]
~ x~,~t = 0
m
for x~ = 0
~ x = 0
m=~
for ~
x = 1:
[21]
ENGINEERING
Fig. 5. Upper and lower bounds on cumulative production from 8,294 wells
in our sample. Vertical wells are excluded from the analysis, whereas twofold
more wells will ultimately be drilled; thus, the upper bound is not an upper
bound on the whole eld.
k
:
Sg + 1 Ka g cg
and
Our approach is somewhat more general than that of Silin and Kneafsey
(10) because we do not require any particular equation of state for natural
gas and do not use the more limited p2 formulation (8). The mp and p2
solutions are equivalent only if p=g Zg is a linear function of pressure;
however, generally, it is not (ref. 8, pp. 254255). The price we pay is that our
model must be solved numerically, but the cost is just a couple of seconds of
delay before the full solution is computed on an average laptop. For the
Barnett Shale, we use the values of well owing pressure pf = 500 psi and
initial reservoir pressure pi = 3,500 psi.
The supercial velocity of gas owing into the right face of the hydrofracture at the origin is
k p
uf =
:
[22]
f x x=0
The mass ow rate into this fracture is
_ = 2HLf uf :
m
[23]
_ = 2HLf
m
k p
:
f x x=0
[24]
Next, we replace the pressure with the real gas pseudopressure in Eq. 14:
_ = 2HL
m
k Mg m
:
2 RT x 0
[25]
The partial derivative can now, in turn, be rewritten with use of the scaled
pseudopressure from Eq. 20, and the permeability, k, can be eliminated
in favor of the gas diffusivity, i , and the characteristic interference
time, .
Let M be the total mass of gas contained originally in the reservoir within
the volume 4LHd between two consecutive hydrofractures, M 4i LHdSg ;
then the gas ow rate into the fracture plane at the origin takes the nal form:
_ =
m
~
M m
,
2 ~
x 0
[26]
[27]
~
M m
:
x~ 0
[28]
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19736 | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1313380110
Here, we are treating the left- and right-most exterior hydrofracture faces
approximately, as extensions of the wellbore length by d at each end. The
reason it is not appropriate to treat the two ends as semiinnite is that
without the great enhancement of permeability brought about by the
hydrofracturing process, gas transport is negligible. Our assumption is that
volumetric rock damage extends beyond the ends of the two last fractures
for characteristic distance d.
Integrating Eq. 28 with respect to the dimensionless time ~t gives the
nal result
m
= RF ~t , where
M
RF ~t
Zt
0
~
m
d~t ~t :
x~ 0
[29]
The initial boundary value problem (Eq. 21) is solved numerically with
an efcient fully implicit solver and a sequential implicit solver. The rst
solver has been implemented in Python, and the second has been implemented in MATLAB (MathWorks). Accurate numerical solutions can be
obtained in both cases within a few seconds on an average laptop. Essential
properties of the result are revealed by exact solution of simplied
equations, depicted in Fig. S6.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank John Browning for help in estimating
reserves, for his deep insights into well performance in the Barnett Shale,
and for help in selection of well-behaved groups of wells. We thank D. Silin,
S. Bhattacharaya, and R. Dombrowski for detailed comments on the manuscript. The gas production data were extracted from the IHS Cambridge Energy
Research Associates database, licensed to the Bureau of Economic Geology.
This paper was supported by the Shell Oil Company/University of Texas at
Austin project Physics of Hydrocarbon Recovery, with T.W.P. and M.M.
as coprincipal investigators, and the Bureau of Economic Geologys Sloan
Foundation-funded project The Role of Shale Gas in the U.S. Energy Transition: Recoverable Resources, Production Rates, and Implications. M.M.
acknowledges partial support from the National Science Foundation Condensed Matter and Materials Theory program.
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in a horizontal reservoir. Transport in Porous Media 51:141156.
16. Vermylen JP (2011) Geomechanical studies of the Barnett Shale, Texas, USAPhD Thesis
(Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA). Available at https://pangea.stanford.edu/departments/
geophysics/dropbox/SRB/public/docs/theses/SRB_125_MAY11_Vermylen.pdf. Accessed
October 23, 2013.
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approach. Part I. Oil and Gas Journal. Available at http://www.ogj.com/articles/print/
volume-111/issue-8/drilling-production/study-develops-decline-analysis-geologic.html.
Accessed October 23, 2013.
18. Browning J, et al. (2013) Barnett Shale reserves and production forecast: A bottom-up
approach. Part II. Oil and Gas Journal. Available at http://www.ogj.com/articles/print/
volume-111/issue-9/drilling-production/barnett-study-determines-full-eld-reserves.htm.
Accessed October 23, 2013.
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(December 31, 2012), press release. Available at potentialgas.org/download/pgc-pressrelease-april-2013-slides.pdf. Accessed October 23, 2013.
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60:302315.
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and future drillwell inventory: Empirical study of the Barnett Shale gas play. SPE
Reservoir Eval Eng, in press.
22. Cui X, Bustin AMM, Bustin RM (2009) Measurements of gas permeability and diffusivity of tight reservoir rocks: Different approaches and their application. Geouids
9:208233.
23. Al-Hussainy R, Ramey HJJ, Crawford PB (1966) The ow of real gases through porous
media. AIME Petrol Transactions 237:624636.
Patzek et al.
Supporting Information
Patzek et al. 10.1073/pnas.1313380110
SI Text
Here, we describe the role of natural gas in the US economy, describe the details of our data-tting procedures, provide additional
evidence concerning the correspondence of the dimensionless recovery factor (RF) and well production data, provide upper and
lower bounds on gas production from wells not yet showing interference, demonstrate why production declines as the square root
of time early on and exponentially later, and tabulate the coefcient
for a variety of reservoir and well owing pressures to demonstrate how little it varies. In a separate spreadsheet (Dataset S1), we
provide tabulations of the dimensionless RF.
Impacts of Natural Gas Production in the United States
As shown in Fig. S1, the United States has managed to maintain
gas production at an essentially at rate for 40 y after a 1974 peak
of gas production that closely followed the 1971 peak in oil
production. No other country has done the same. Novel technology,
most recently the massively hydrofractured horizontal wells in
shale plays, has played a crucial role in maintaining US gas
production at or slightly above its 1974 level. As a result of
plentiful gas production, US gas prices have recently been a
fraction of the typical world gas prices, injecting over half a
trillion current dollars into the US economy (Fig. S2). This
second stimulus package in the United States has been almost
invisible to the public.
Data Analysis and Fitting Procedure
We analyzed the 16,533 wells in our dataset for the Barnett Shale
through the following steps:
i) We eliminate all wells that have been recompleted, all vertical wells, and all months from each wells time history with
production of zero. At this point, 11,566 wells remain.
ii) We eliminate all wells with less than 18 mo of total production. Now, 8,807 wells remain.
iii) For each well, we have a measurement of production per
day for a sample of days each month. We convert to production per month by multiplying by 30.4.
iv) The rst 3 to 4 mo of production are typically noisy and
sporadic, particularly because hydrofracturing water is still
being back-produced. Therefore, from the time series for
each well, we construct a slightly modied one. We label the
starting time of this new series 2.5 (mo), and we assign to it
the cumulative production of the rst 4 mo. There is no
further processing: For each new nonzero gas volume produced in a given month, time increases by 1 mo and cumulative production increases by the production of that month
until the data end.
v) We use the LevenbergMarquardt least-squares minimization (lmt) Python package to nd the values of the interference time and gas in place M that best t our scaling
curve to the measured cumulative production. In particular,
we minimize the objective function mt MRFt=, where
mt is the measured cumulative production data. Although
the reservoir pressure pi is not the same for all wells in the
Barnett Shale, we make use only of the curve corresponding
to pi = 3;500psi, pf = 500psi in this paper. We also conducted the analysis allowing pi to vary according to measured
pressure variations, but the difference was negligible.
vi) We had to guard against a number of artifacts that could
produce spurious agreement between well histories and the
scaling function. For wells with very short histories, uctuations
Patzek et al. www.pnas.org/cgi/content/short/1313380110
[S1]
~
~
1 m
2 m
=
:
2
i 2
[S2]
~
This equation is of the rst order in m=,
and the solution is
obtained in a straightforward manner. Dene F by
Z
F =
d exp
Z
0
d
:
[S3]
Then
goes as t.
For any given initial condition, solutions of the diffusion
equation (Eq. 21) in a semiinnite space tend toward the solution given in Eq. S4. This is why,
p after an early transient period,
decline of p
production
as 1= t and growth of cumulative pro
duction as t are universal for a time. This solution persists until
the onset of interference between consecutive hydrofractures.
Asymptotic Analysis of Gas Production at Late Times
When one waits sufciently long, pressure drops everywhere in
the reservoir until it hovers just above the well owing pressure. In
this late-time regime, the hydraulic diffusivity p can be replaced by the constant pf . With the simplication that the
hydraulic diffusivity is constant and the interference time and
scaled time ~t are dened in terms of , Eq. 21 can be solved
exactly with the same boundary conditions as before, and the
result is
X
2 2~
~
m
=2
e 2n + 1 t=4
~x 0
n=0
p
p
erfc 3 2~t=4
p
4 2~t=4
|{z}
1
2~
+ e t=4 + e9 t=4 :
2
|{z}
2~
Exponential decline
[S6]
The relative importance of the three terms in Eq. S6 is plotted in
Fig. S5. We make two points about the result.
i) If the only goal is to provide an accurate account of the longtime behavior, this computation shows self-consistently that
the decline rate is exponential just so long as the limit of as
p pf is well dened.
ii) One can instead use the computation as an approximate analytical description of the entire decline process. In this case,
instead of using = pf , one should use = p; that is, one
should use a hydraulic diffusivity characteristic of the average pressure in the reservoir. The resulting approximation
haspthe property of leading to a decline curve that goes as
1= t at early times, and declining exponentially at late times
just like the exact solution (Fig. S6). However, this approximation leads to errors on the order of 50%. No matter how
one tunes a constant
, one cannot get both the coefcient of
p
the original 1= t decline and the total gas recovered right.
Tabulation of
Table S1 extracts the coefcient
p , describing the initial rise in
cumulative production as ~t from the dimensionless RF for a
variety of reservoir and well owing pressures. The main lesson is
that it varies rather little and can safely be taken to assume a
nominal value of 0.645 across the Barnett Shale.
1. Fu Q, et al. (2013) Log-based thickness and porosity mapping of the Barnett Shale play,
Fort Worth Basin, Texas: A proxy for reservoir quality assessment. AAPG Bull, in press.
~
m
= mi
F
:
F
[S4]
2 of 6
Fig. S1. In the United States, gas production doubled about 10-fold, growing by a factor of 1,000. Natural gas production, associated with the fundamental
Hubbert oil peak in the United States, peaked in 1974. However, a second fundamental gas cycle has been created by producing new gas (increasingly deep
offshore, from Alaska, tight gas sands, coal-bed methane, and now shales) resources in the United States. As a result, after growing at 7% per year until 1974
(red line), gas production has remained at over the past 40 y (blue line). Recently, gas production in the United States has actually been increasing, mostly due
to shale gas production. Note that 1 exaJoule (EJ) 1 trillion standard cubic feet (Tscf) of gas. Data source: US Department of Energy, Energy Information
Administration.
Fig. S2. Because of shale gas production, natural gas prices in the United States have plummeted to one-fourth of the Russian gas price. This plot subtracts
the cumulative amount the United States has actually spent on natural gas from the amount it would have spent at world (Russian) prices. Since 1991, domestic
gas production in the United States has delivered $560 billion US dollars (blue line) ($250 billion in constant 1983 US dollars, red line) to the US economy. Cheap
natural gas has led to a decrease of US CO2 emissions, increased employment, and a renaissance of steel production and manufacturing. Cheap reliable energy
is fundamental to a healthy economy, but very few people recognize this truism. Natural gas prices are from the Index Mundi (www.indexmundi.com/
commodities/). The consumer price index is from the US Census Bureau.
3 of 6
Fig. S3.
Production rate for all qualifying horizontal wells in the Barnett Shale shows evidence of interference.
Fig. S4. Original gas in place is computed by tting M to well production data compared for each well, with an upper bound obtained from data on the
dimensions of the well.
4 of 6
Fig. S5.
Bounds on the interference time and the original mass of gas in place M for the wells from Fig. 3B in the square root phase.
Fig. S6. Relative importance of the three-term rate approximation in Eq. S6, summed to form the black curve. Note that for ~t 0:2, production declines as the
square root of time (red curve). For ~t 1, the production rate decline is exponential (pink and blue curves). For 0:2 ~t < 1, there is a transition from the square
root of time decline to the exponential decline. This plot was obtained from linear analysis. For nonlinear cases, it turns out that when the time to interference,
, is referenced to the initial reservoir conditions, similar values of ~t govern transitions between production decline regimes.
5 of 6
Table S1.
Scaling factor
pi
2,000
2,500
3,000
3,500
4,000
4,500
pf = 500
pf = 400
0.650
0.663
0.661
0.645
0.634
0.633
0.671
0.672
0.671
0.653
0.642
0.641
p
For scaled times p~t <
0:2, cumulative production increases as t . The dimensionless RF ~t and this table display values of for various initial
and well owing pressures for a reservoir temperature of 190 F. There is
no simple expression for , but it does not vary much.
6 of 6