Controlling Factors of Shale Gas Production: What can Artificial Intelligence Tell Us?

Abstract

Abstract Application of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technique has made development of shale gas reservoir successful in the United States during the past decade. Chasing its operational success, researchers have been studying to understand the fundamentals of shale gas production, which will provide valuable information to assist in optimization of shale reservoir development. Unfortunately, the mechanism of shale gas production has not been fully revealed so far, and most reservoir simulation models are adopting the mechanism of coalbed methane production to forecast shale gas development process, which might not be the real case. In this paper, instead of using numerical simulation model, artificial intelligence and data mining techniques are implemented to study the controlling factors of shale gas production and understand the impacts of reservoir, completion and stimulation parameters in a dynamic manner only according to the field data. A database of Marcellus shale reservoir is generated by integrating information such as well locations, well trajectories, reservoir characteristics, completion, hydraulic fracturing, and production parameters, etc. Neural network models are trained to learn the key performance impacting factors on shale gas production in a dynamic manner, which could assist reservoir management decisions.