Introduction

In Oil and Gas, specifically well completions; the data generation is relatively fast and and volumes are large. Being able to harvest information from this large amount of datasets or to automate business logic that can saves us time and effort and also impact our downstream decisions. One of these areas is well completions, where data from different stages and sources is generated in high rate and large volumes. Using tools like Spotfire coupled with programming languages like Python, can make a huge difference and gives us more flexibility in automating many of the time and effort consuming tasks to be completed without any intervention, in which we can make of the time to make sure that the logic that we came up with agrees with the domain knowledge. 

What is Hydrofracturing

Hydrofracturing is one of the many unconventional resources completion procedures. It involves creating a permanent micro fractures that increase the formation permeability since these tight reservoirs are known for being a very non-permeable hydrocarbon bearing formations. These micro-fractures are kept open by using micro-particles called (sand), their sizes range according to the reservoir properties. The hydrofracturing process involves high pressure pumping schedules in a relatively short time intervals, which makes it very useful to perform analysis on the fly or as data comes in.

Source: Wikipedia

What is the treatment plot

The animation below shows a live view of the treatment plot in addition to the current operation's important parameters and activity. It also uses some conditional bases ruling to predict the current operation and which well is currently being worked on. The treatment plot can be coupled with further features to detect any anomalies or unexpected behavior. 

The treatment curve or the pressure vs. time plot has several distinguished sections as it showing in the plot below, looking at the following plot we can see that formation breakdown starts at Pc where fractures will start forming and accept the pumped slurry for the following period, the fall down period is identified but large pressure drop after a period of pumping. This section of the curve is used to estimate the instantaneous shut-in pressure.

Source: Janusz Makówka, ReserachGate

What is the ISIP and why it's important

After the end of the pumping period, instantaneous Shut-in Pressure occurs immediately. The importance of the ISIP is that it can tell the fracture closure pressure. The value is close to fracture propagation pressure and more than the fracture pressure. There were several approaches to estimate the ISIP from fall-off data, some of them are described in SPE-191465-18IHFT-MS. The ISIP can give us a very good idea about the fracture gradient in the vicinity and will help us reduce the uncertainity in future frack jobs design. The ISIP is also a proxy to the reservoir potential.

Using Spotfire Well Completion App to estimate the ISIP

Spotfire along with Python native support has made it easy to implement/automate any of these methods and harvest more value from the abundant data we have in a very short time. In this example we have implemented the early and late departure methods to estimate the ISIP with the help of our recently develop spotfire-dsml python package.

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