Transformative Improvements in Hydraulic Fracture Design – Applications for Oil, Gas, and Geothermal

Mark McClure established ResFrac in 2015 to help operators maximize value through the application of advanced geomechanics and reservoir simulation. Before founding ResFrac, Mark was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering. After earning a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering and a Master of Science in petroleum engineering from Stanford University, Mark earned a PhD in energy resources engineering at Stanford.

Abstract:

The widespread adoption of multistage fracturing in shale in the 2000s has been widely celebrated for unlocking enormous new hydrocarbon resources and transforming the global energy industry. Far less recognized - since the mid-2010s, hydraulic fracture designs have changed dramatically, resulting in large improvement in well performance, relative to the earlier generations of shale wells. Alongside changes in fracture design, the quality of subsurface data has improved dramatically over the past decade as new diagnostics have become available, shifting our understanding of subsurface processes. In many ways, the barrier to improvement was not technical, but conceptual - the mental model of hydraulic stimulation in shale from the 2000s has not proven to be representative of most shale wells, and it led to engineering decisions that were suboptimal. Over the past few years, an analogous shift has occurred in hydraulic stimulation design for Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). Design changes have unlocked enormous improvements in flow rate and stimulated fracture surface area in EGS. These changes have largely relied on discarding the mental model that guided the earlier generation of EGS fracture designs, doing things that 'aren't supposed to work.'  In this talk, I outline the shifts in fracture design that have enabled improvements in shale and EGS. Also, I give my perspective on the importance of critical thinking and evaluating the quality and confidence of interpretations based on incomplete information, and how progress can be slowed by group dynamics and a tendency to overestimate confidence in initial interpretations.