Last month we held our third annual ResFrac Symposium. The event was hosted at the Houston Club in downtown Houston the day after URTeC. At each Symposium, we invite users to present case studies of using ResFrac as well as host panel discussions on more general topics. This year’s lineup featured six operator-speakers as well as guests from the DOE and an independent consultant. I took away three themes from this year’s symposium:

1. FANTASTIC to see you all again
2. ResFrac going mainstream
3. Geothermal is gaining momentum

First, it was incredible to see many of our customers in the flesh. It’s been a long 18+ months since I had seen many of you, and Zoom just doesn’t do it justice.

Second, ResFrac is going mainstream. We had several talks centered around core workflows enabled by teams using ResFrac: collecting data, facilitating multidisciplinary discussions, calibrating to field diagnostics, and performing economic optimization of prospective designs. Two presentations I’d highlight. 

• The first from a large independent focused on change management and how to structure studies, including learnings on how to implement ResFrac studies in their organization. One of the key takeaways? The ResFrac A to Z Guide provides a valuable template for structuring studies.
• The second was a Midland Basin operator who flipped the typical workflow around. This operator modeled the expected fracture geometries for various stress profiles on a prospective pad and how those would manifest on cross-well fiber then went and frac’ed the pad. This allowed them to validate/falsify their various stress profiles, with one stress profile comparing very favorably to acquired data. This is the reverse workflow of other ResFrac modeling work that has been published previously, like what Apache had published at HFTC this year (Shahri et al., 2021).

Third, geothermal was a hot topic at URTeC the three days preceding the Symposium, and that discussion carried over. The Symposium this year featured two geothermal presentations and stimulated lots of discussion. The next 18 months will be defining for the future of the geothermal industry with many innovators pushing the frontiers of the industry forward.