Production Analysis in the Eagle Ford Shale — Best Practices for Diagnostic Interpretations, Analysis, and Modeling

Abstract

Abstract The Eagle Ford Shale (South Texas, USA) is emerging as the foremost "liquids-rich" shale play in North America. As such, the use of production data analysis in the Eagle Ford Shale has tremendous importance in: Determining well/reservoir properties; Establishing completion effectiveness; and Estimating future production. The Eagle Ford Shale presents additional difficulty in the form of fluid behavior characterization. Near-critical PVT behavior (as in the case of the Eagle Ford Shale) is an important component of well performance, which cannot be overlooked during analysis and modeling. The results of this work address the common challenges encountered during production analysis and modeling of the Eagle Ford shale wells. In particular, it is shown that significant differences are observed in production forecast due to characterization of the fluid. This work provides a systematic workflow to analyze and forecast production data in near-critical reservoirs with examples from the Eagle Ford Shale and delivers more insight into analysis of production data in unconventional "liquids-rich" reservoirs, and offers to decrease the uncertainty related with production forecast that is mainly caused by lack of understanding of "near-critical" fluid behavior.