Fervo Energy proved fracturing can harvest geothermal energy and is now rapidly learning to build a utility-scale power plant. Earlier this year, one of the founders of Fervo Energy announced that the geothermal innovator had reached its “Mitchell moment.” Jack Norbeck, chief technology officer for Fervo, likened a test where it used a pair of fractured wells to create water hot enough to generate electricity to the time when Mitchell Energy adopted slickwater fracturing to economically extract large amounts of gas from the ultratight rock in the Barnett Formation. “We have derisked all those core challenges, we reached the Mitchell Energy moment for geothermal.”

ResFrac customer, Fervo Energy has shown that fracturing can be used to build a geothermal heating system in hot, hard rock. During a 37 day test at it’s Project Red test site, the Houston company produced as much as 63 L/s (998 gal/min) of water heated to 336 degrees F. By pumping water from an injection well through fractured hot rock to a producing well, it heated enough water to generate up to 3.5MW of power, according to a company release.

The project’s results are a “historic breakthrough” for geothermal power, but Fervo still has much work ahead, according to Mark McClure, CEO of ResFrac, a firm that develops hydraulic fracturing simulation software. “Even as they continue to achieve technical success, they will need to demonstrate the commercial model — that they can secure funding, execute, and drive down costs to achieve long-term profitability,” he said Wednesday in a review of the project’s results.

ResFrac Corporation Chief Operating Officer, Garrett Fowler, has been named 2023–2024 SPE Distinguished Lecturer. Garrett will be presenting on “How To Leverage What We’ve Learned About Hydraulic Fractures.” DL Speakers from various disciplines and professions focus on industry trends, challenges, technology applications, and advances. Scheduled DL events are in-person meetings only.

Hitting the next well during fracturing happens all the time. Predictably doing that on a large scale in granite looks a lot harder. Backed by $220 million from the US Department of Energy, the Utah FORGE team’s goal is to develop the techniques and tools needed to create well-to-well flow paths through rocks that are at more than 400°F and then send the heated fluids to the surface to power electric generation. This approach is known as an enhanced geothermal system (EGS). A paper recently presented at the SPE Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference highlighted the problem. The reservoir modeling firm ResFrac offered examples of what can be done to understand geothermal fracturing systems, but said it is not yet possible to model a well plan for a specific location.

Insights from an ongoing industry study on North American shale wells help explain what frac hits, or fracture-driven interactions, are doing between offset wells, and why. When trying to understand the well-to-well events known as frac hits and fracture-driven interactions (FDIs), the first idea to embrace is this: they are not all the same. “And the key physical mechanisms are not the same,” said Mark McClure, who added that, “Until you’ve really dialed in on what those are, you’re really in the dark.”

Flow rate is a major challenge for geothermal. However, the techniques used in shale to prevent flow localization can be applied directly to geothermal. If we can create hundreds or thousands of flowing fracture pathways around a horizontal or deviated geothermal well, then we will have truly “changed the game.” Read the article at the Journal of Petroleum Technology.

Mark McClure, CEO,  of ResFrac Corporation was interviewed on the Energy 360 Podcast by Dan Genovese, Director of Consulting Services at Enercom to discuss unique modeling in a three-dimensional simulator for reservoir simulations. In this market, every dollar counts in your limited capital budgets. Click to view the interview and learn more about the collaboration, transparency and the realism in the fluid flow and Proppant transport.

Some really great insights by ResFrac CEO Mark McClure on the complementary nature between physics-based modeling and data science and automation in the oil sector. Thanks to Hoss Belyadi for facilitating this important discussion.

Two industry leaders, Dr. Mark Zoback and Joe Frantz, have joined the company as senior executive advisers.
ResFrac recently released its new user interface, modernizing the industry’s first genuinely coupled hydraulic fracture, wellbore and reservoir simulator.

ResFrac co-founder and CEO Mark McClure joined Collin and Jake from the Digital Wildcatters’ Oil and Gas Startup Podcast to discuss ResFrac’s origin, approach, technology, and culture.

For the past 20 years, the diagnostic fracture injection test has been used across the frontlines of the shale revolution to paint a picture of what cannot be seen. However, that picture has not always been so clear in the eyes of subsurface engineers. Last year, a joint-industry project supported by six shale producers formed to develop a new methodology that aims to bring fractures into sharper focus—especially when it comes to obtaining accurate permeability estimates from within shale gas formations

ATCE welcomes ResFrac Corporation to the vibrant and innovative Startup Village. Designed to ignite the entrepreneurial spirit in the energy industry, this competition showcases a remarkable competition for emerging startups in the energy field. This is your chance to promote your ingenuity and creativity by presenting your groundbreaking solutions, technologies, and business models that will revolutionize the energy sector. Compete with other energy startups to win prizes, gain visibility and recognition by industry leaders, gain mentorship and network with energy investors!

Being a startup in the upstream industry does not make for an easy existence. For starters, the target customer base is famously known for its collective skepticism of new and unproven technologies. And even if an innovation passes technical muster, it must go well beyond creating nominal value to entertain wide interest from oil and gas companies. ResFrac’s precursor company, McClure Geomechanics, was named among the most promising startups by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship for the Offshore Technology Conference’s (OTC) Startup Roundup in 2018.

The diagnostic fracture injection test (DFIT), also called a mini-frac, has helped steer the completion designs of countless horizontal wells over the years. However, an ongoing industry study is about to give engineers a new, and possibly significantly more accu­rate, way to use it. As a result of the project, “What I believe is going to happen, is that in 3 years everyone will have completely changed how they interpret the test,” said Mark McClure, the founder and chief executive officer of ResFrac Corp.