20 Years of Horizontal Multistage Completions: A Summary of Industry Evolution in Unconventional and Conventional Plays

Abstract

Abstract In the past two decades, the advent of the Shale Gas Revolution (SGR) was made possible by the visionary idea that hydrocarbons contained in ultra-low permeability source rocks could be extracted using available technology. Usually, these hydrocarbons take geological time to migrate to higher permeability reservoir rocks until the right structural conditions evolve to extract as recoverable resources. However, paradigm shifts in drilling and completion engineering have enabled unlocking resources from these ultra-tight formations. The innovative idea at the base of this industrial revolution was the combination of horizontal well drilling and hydraulic fracturing, which allowed increasing the surface area available for hydrocarbon flow and overcame the slow and shallow hydrocarbon release from the source rock. This approach can be considered as a bridge between petroleum engineering based on radial diffusivity equation and mining engineering based on physically accessing and extracting the resource. To achieve the high number of hydraulic fractures needed for economical production, different execution techniques evolved and developed in what is known as horizontal multistage fracturing (HMSF) completions. Although HMSF is indescribably linked to SGR, it was surprisingly applied in tight gas formation and offshore sand control applications more than 30 or 40 years ago. SGR contributed to the fast development of new innovative systems engineered and deployed at scale all over North America land operations and was subsequently exported internationally in conventional, unconventional, land, and offshore applications. This paper will cover the most common HMSF completion systems types with a primary focus on unconventionals. It will encompass the evolution of these systems over the past several decades. It will also explore the opportunity case for conventional, and high permeability plays through a series of theoretical and real examples.