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Full Download Book Unconventional Shale Gas Development Lessons Learned PDF
Full Download Book Unconventional Shale Gas Development Lessons Learned PDF
Edited by
ROUZBEH G. MOGHANLOO
Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering,
The University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, United States
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ISBN: 978-0-323-90185-7
Gayan A. Abeykoon
Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, The University of Texas
at Austin, Austin, TX, United States
Francisco J. Argüelles-Vivas
Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, The University of Texas
at Austin, Austin, TX, United States
Arash Dahi-Taleghani
John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, The
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States
Hassan Dehghanpour
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
Deepak Devegowda
Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering, The University of Oklahoma,
Norman, OK, United States
Birol Dindoruk
Cullen College of Engineering, Petroleum Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX,
United States
Tawfik Elshehabi
Petroleum Engineering Department, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, United States
Yingkun Fu
School of Energy Resources, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, P.R. China; State Key
Laboratory of Shale Oil and Gas Enrichment Mechanisms and Effective Development, Beijing,
P.R. China; Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Alberta,
Edmonton, AB, Canada
Zoya Heidari
The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States
Amirmasoud Kalantari-Dahaghi
Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, The University of Kansas, Lawrence,
KS, United States
Hamidreza Karami
Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering, The University of Oklahoma,
Norman, OK, United States
Lucy Tingwei Ko
Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States
Ademide O. Mabadeje
Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, Cockrell School of
Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States
xiii
xiv List of contributors
Hao Yu
State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation, Southwest
Petroleum University, Chengdu, China
Sebastian Zavaleta Villarreal
Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering, The University of Oklahoma,
Norman, OK, United States
Preface
Shale gas development has radically changed the natural gas market in North America.
Given the abundance of natural gas at historically low prices having become a possibil-
ity in the United States owing to technological advances, the presence of operators
with sufficient risk appetite, and favorable monetary policies, as a result, the produc-
tion of natural gas in the United States has seen an increasing trend for the past decade
and had peaked at about 960 billion cubic meters in 2019. This bolstered domestic
production has turned the country into a powerful player in global natural gas mar-
kets. Consequently, the United States has risen to become the world's top exporter
from being in the lower 48 countries in just six years after its first LNG cargo was
exported in 2016.
This book is an attempt to summarize the technological advances realized through
shale gas revolution. The book has been specifically designed for asset managers, petro-
leum engineers, shale gas stakeholders, and graduate students who would like to learn
more about the different aspects of and challenges associated with the production of
natural gas from shale gas resources.
Chapter 1 delves into the details of asset management issues and delineates upon
the reserves reporting for shale reservoirs. Chapter 2 addresses geological characteriza-
tion covering topics such as heterogeneity and organic chemistry of shale gas and ends
with case studies from multiple shale plays. Chapter 3 provides a comprehensive
review of well construction and casing fatigue in multifractured horizontal wells.
Chapter 4 is specifically dedicated to well control challenges in horizontal wells and
discusses operational complications that occur in shale gas wells. Chapter 5 is devoted
to well integrity and wellbore stability issues and presents stability of wells in
Tuscaloosa shale plays as the case study.
Chapter 6 highlights the challenges in formation evaluation of organic-rich mud
rocks and goes into the details of recent advances to overcome them. Chapter 7
reviews interpretation methods used for diagnostic fracture injection tests and explains
the author’s preferred approach. Chapter 8 outlines a new technique based upon
wavelet analysis evaluating a fracture network in the system with some examples from
Utah’s FORGE project. Chapter 9 elaborates proppant placement and the challenges
associated with proppant transport in complex fracture networks.
Chapter 10 presents geomechanical modeling covering topics such as fracture prop-
agation and casing deformation. Chapter 11 introduces a new decline model that can
successfully describe water production during flow back. Chapter 12 outlines the
implementation of molecular dynamics simulation to describe fluids distribution in
xvii
xviii Preface
organic matter. Chapter 13 provides a comprehensive review of recent efforts for wet-
tability alteration in liquid-rich shale plays. Chapter 14 elaborates on the scale depen-
dency of petrophysical properties of shale samples.
Chapter 15 addresses the challenges associated with fluid lifting and the practical
treatments suggested for shale systems. Chapter 16 summarizes production data analysis
developed for shale gas wells. Chapter 17 delineates on the applications of artificial
intelligence and machine learning algorithms in building meaningful relations between
experimental data and production performance. Chapter 18 unveils a new screening
protocol for evaluation of gas injection experiments conducted to enhance liquid pro-
duction and discusses the Eagle Ford case study. Chapter 19 deals with sampling bias
in data-driven approaches used in shale gas development and introduces a new work-
flow for debiasing spatially clustered samples.
Contents
v
vi Contents
2.11 Case studies: The Middle Devonian Marcellus Formation and the Appalachian Basin 52
2.11.1 Organic matter, total organic matter, and thermal maturity 57
2.11.2 Key aspects of the Marcellus Formation 58
2.12 Geoenvironmental challenges in the development of shale-gas reservoirs 60
2.13 Conclusions 63
References 63
9.2 Sediment transport theory and transport mechanisms in noncrosslinked fluids 258
9.2.1 Single-particle settling and Stokes’ law 259
9.2.2 Deviations from Stokes’ law 262
9.3 Proppant transport in vertical fractures 263
9.3.1 Experimental work 263
9.3.2 Correlations to predict proppant settling 267
9.4 Proppant transport in complex fracture networks 269
9.4.1 Experimental work 270
9.4.2 Numerical simulations using computation fluid dynamics and discrete
element method models 274
References 275
Further reading 278
10. Advances in geomechanical modeling 279
Hao Yu and Arash Dahi-Taleghani
10.1 Introduction to rock mechanics at granular mesoscale 279
10.2 Fracture propagation model 282
10.2.1 Cohesive zone method 283
10.2.2 Fracture network simulation using cohesive zone method 285
10.3 Mechanical earth modeling 289
10.4 Casing deformation problems 290
References 296
11. Advances in flowback analysis: fracturing water production obeys a
simple decline model 299
Yingkun Fu and Hassan Dehghanpour
11.1 Introduction 299
11.2 Methodology 301
11.3 Water-rate decline during flowback and postflowback 301
11.3.1 Reservoir and well-completion data 301
11.3.2 Field observations 303
11.3.3 The physics of water flowback 306
11.4 Harmonic water-rate decline model 307
11.5 Application and discussions 310
11.5.1 Validating harmonic-decline model 310
11.5.2 Fitting harmonic-decline model to field data 311
11.5.3 Water recovery factor 311
11.5.4 Ultimate water recovery volume 315
11.6 Limitations and recommendations 316
11.7 Conclusion 317
Acknowledgments 317
References 317
x Contents
12. Application of molecular dynamics simulations for shale gas systems 323
Deepak Devegowda and Felipe Perez
13. Wettability modifiers for enhanced oil recovery from tight and shale
reservoirs 345
Francisco J. Argüelles-Vivas, Gayan A. Abeykoon and Ryosuke Okuno
15. Challenges associated with lifting and loading in shale gas wellbore systems 405
Hamidreza Karami
19. Spatial data analytics for optimum data declustering in shale systems 457
Ademide O. Mabadeje and Michael J. Pyrcz
19.1 Introduction 457
19.2 Methodology 462
19.3 Results and discussions 464
19.4 Conclusions 469
References 469
Index 471
CHAPTER 1
1.1 Introduction
Hydrocarbon production from shale reservoirs has transformed the American oil and
gas industry and has led to the country’s energy independence in recent years. The
phenomenal growth in the last two decades, the resilience of the exploration and pro-
duction (E&P) operators amidst commodity price volatility in the last few years, and a
promising outlook for the coming decades sums up the story of America’s shale boom
recently.
In the 1950s, when the American geophysicist M. King Hubbert made his pre-
dictions of oil production peaking in the lower 48 states of the United States, the
oil industry was still in its technical infancy. While Hubert was right about the
peak oil in the 1970s at 10 million barrels per day, commonly referred to as the
“Hubbert’s Peak,” his statistical analysis did not consider the advances in technol-
ogy that would make the extraction of hydrocarbons from ultra-tight reservoirs
possible. The application of horizontal drilling in conjunction with advances in
hydraulic fracturing has led to the economic extraction of oil and natural gas from
tight, low-permeability unconventional formations, such as shale. The develop-
ment of shale formations, once assumed to act as a “seal” in the conventional
petroleum system, led to a reversal of US oil production decline, and in
November 2017, the daily production once again surpassed the 10 million barrel
mark for the first time since 1970 (Fig. 1.1). Fig. 1.2 shows the shale plays in the
lower 48 states of the United States.
Although the United States and Canada are the two leading countries involved in
the commercial development of shale reservoirs, an assessment by the United States
Energy Information Administration in 2013 reported technically recoverable resources
of 7299 tcf of shale gas and 345 MMbbls of shale oil in 137 shale formations across 41
countries (United States EIA, 2013). China and Argentina currently also have ongoing
development programs but with limited commercial success.
Figure 1.1 19202020 US field daily production of crude oil (US EIA).
Figure 1.2 Shale plays in the US Lower 48 (United States EIA, 2009).
Field development and asset management 3
1.2 Background
The term “shale” refers to a hard mudstone composed of fine clastic grains less than
1/16 mm in size, clay minerals, and organic matter with shaley or thinly laminar bedding.
Shale is considered the source rock for conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon
accumulations. In terms of hydrocarbon accumulation and distribution, the shale forma-
tions are classified as “continuous” accumulations and are not confined to the geologic
structure or trap. However, the formation is heterogeneous in nature, and the mineralogy,
organic content, natural fractures, and other properties vary spatially. Shales are character-
ized by very low porosity (typically less than 5%) and ultra-low permeability (100 nD to
1 mD), making them challenging in recovering viable hydrocarbons economically without
hydraulic fracturing. The hydrocarbon storage mechanism in shale formations is more
complex than the conventional sandstone reservoirs. Since the shale formation act as both
source rock and reservoir for hydrocarbon production, it is referred to as a resource play.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal compared the various development vari-
ables for four different types of conventional and unconventional plays—conventional
onshore play in Saudi Arabia, conventional play offshore, oil sands in Alberta, and
shale reservoir in shale play (Fig. 1.3). With the technological advances in drilling and
completions over the past decade in the US shale industry, the spud to first production
cycle time is probably the fastest. The cost of developing wells has also decreased sig-
nificantly over the past decade, making shale development on the low end of cost per barrel
compared to other plays. However, due to the low porosity and permeability, the
production decline rate is the highest among the four. The article provided an excel-
lent analogy to explain the issue with the high production decline rate—producing oil
and gas out of a conventional well is much like slowly pouring soda out of a can,
whereas producing oil and gas from a hydraulically fractured shale well looks like what
happens when you shake the can and open it. The hydrocarbons come out quickly
Figure 1.3 Comparison of oil and gas exploration technologies. (Modified from Lee, 2020).
4 Unconventional Shale Gas Development
from a fractured shale well but start losing momentum rapidly, too. In an Eagle Ford
well, the oil production declines 60% in the first year but more than 90% over the first
3 years. In comparison, conventional oil fields only decline 5%10% a year (Lee,
2020). This has a direct implication on the field development with more shale wells
(and more capital) needed each year for production maintenance (i.e., keeping field
production flat) or growth, compared to a conventional field.