Modeling Frac Hits: Mechanisms for Damage Versus Uplift

Garrett Fowler; Dave Ratcliff; Mark McClure
Paper presented at the International Petroleum Technology Conference, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, February 2022.
Parent/child interactions pose a critical challenge for oil and gas shale producers (Roussel et al., 2013Yaich et al., 2014Rimedio et al., 2015Miller et al., 2016King et al., 2017Dhuldhoya and Dusterhoft, 2017Cipolla et al., 2018Whitfield et al., 2018Rainbolt and Esco, 2018Lindsay et al., 2018Gale et al., 2018Scherz et al., 2019Guo et al., 2019Jin and Zoback, 2019Kumar et al., 2020Zheng et al., 2020Gupta et al., 2020). The industry has progressed significantly in its understanding of causes and mitigation. However, important uncertainties remain. Fracture driven interactions or more commonly, “frac hits”, exhibit varied behaviors in different basins. In the majority of basins, parent wells exhibit production loses after a frac hit. We examine and contrast a case study in the Bakken where production uplift occurs to observations of production loss in a STACK case study in Oklahoma. We show the productivity enhancement in the Bakken case study is driven by proppant transport and fracture conductivity amplification, with no apparent skin or conductivity damage. This suggests that absent specific damage mechanisms, frac hits alone can improve productivity via repressurization and increased propped area. In the STACK case study, fracture conductivity damage reactions must be introduced in order to match the historical data. This suggests that in the STACK, and perhaps other basins, additional processes are occurring in the subsurface to hinder the productivity of wells after frac hits. We postulate that minerology, petrophysics, and reservoir condition differences between basins causes differences in impacts of the fracture driven interactions.

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