Optimizing the Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Systems Using the Completion and Production Data in Bakken Shale

Abstract

AbstractObjectives/Scope. Well completion is an important step for every well to undergo in order to prepare it for oil and gas extraction. Based on the nature and characteristics of an oil and gas reservoir, appropriate well completion practices are selected to enhance the production. Hydraulic fracturing is one such technique. It frequently involves horizontal drilling and injecting fluids under high pressure to fracture the rock. The larger fractures along with the injected fluid enable high amounts of trapped natural gas and crude oil to flow out of the formation to the producing well bore. In well completion, a variety of chemicals are employed to leverage oil production, and the goal of this study is to determine how such chemicals impact performance rate in several unconventional wells in the Bakken Shale.Methods, Procedures, Process. In this approach, two Completion and Production datasets from North Dakota (the Bakken Shale) and fracFocus were processed and combined accordingly which resulted in some of the following parameters, type of chemical and amount of chemical, and true vertical depth of the wells. And the dataset that was produced was analyzed based on the stimulation treatment. The proposed workflow utilizes supervised machine learning algorithms to train different predictive models to estimate the amount of the produced oil; including but not limited to neural Random Forest, CATboost and XGboost. Additionally, by quantifying each chemicals’ importance on oil production, this investigation was able to determine each chemical's influence.Results, Observations, Conclusions. This study examined the impact of more than 2500 different completion chemicals on the oil production of unconventional reservoir and discovered the chemicals with the highest significance on the oil production, given that, the predictive models were able to estimate the oil production accurately after feeding it with the type and measures of the most influencing chemicals.Novel/Additive Information. The most important pillar of this framework is that it expedites the workflow of hydraulic fracturing jobs in the unconventional reservoir by providing an accurate model that optimizes its parameters to maximize the oil production rate. This solution offers an automated decision-making process for the selection of chemical types to be used in the hydraulic fracking jobs. The choice of chemicals in fracturing fluids is affected by many variables, including its compatibility with the target rock formation to be hydraulically fractured, the geology of the rock formations being drilled through, the pressure and temperature measurements in the target formation, cost, operator preference, and possible interactions between chemicals in the treatment fluid.