Springer, September 23, 2019: growth drivers of Bakken oil well productivity. The full article currently available. One may want to archive it before it disappears. Wow, wow, wow -- a light bulb goes off -- it comes down to technology and geology. The former is dynamic, the latter is static. Let's look at geology. In all the articles I have read, this seems to be the progression:
- the oldest articles compared basins around the world -- akin to macroeconomics in the business world
- with the shale revolution, articles began to compare various basins in the US: the Haynesville, the Marcellus, the Permian, the Eagle Ford, the Bakken, etc. -- again, macroeconomics
- most recently, analysts are comparing "areas" within a basin, such as areas owned by certain operators, or in the case of the North Dakota Bakken, the four or five major counties
- I don't follow the other plays closely enough to say, but in the North Dakota Bakken, for whatever reason the state regulators decided to define fields, it has worked out incredibly well;
- it seems like a no-brainer but studies are still faulted for comparing McKenzie County with Williams County, for example. Each of those counties is relatively huge; and different fields within each county vary significantly in quality.
Denver Well Logging Society, Spring, 2019, workshop.
Hart Energy, one year ago, September 4, 2018: shifting the focus to optimized production. Operators see opportunities for production gains in legacy wells, refracturing, and data analytics.
- caption at the linked article: Equinor will deploy artificial-intelligence powered artificial lift technology on its rod pump wells in North Dakota
- there is evidence that operators might be pumping as much proppant into the well as they can can and that laterals have extended so long that it might not be economic to drill out much farther
- the phrase "reached a point of maximum return" is tarting to show up more often
- so, if operators have reached "maximum return" with regard to sand, where do they go next?
- Equinor -- machine learning/artificial intelligence
in late July (2018) Equinor announced it will deploy a rod lift technology developed by Ambyint—a company that specializes in artificial lift and production optimization equipment— on its wells in the Bakken Shale, where Equinor will expand the system to full-field development.During pilot testing, Equinor was able to automate rod pump well optimization through the use of Ambyint’s autonomous set point management functionality, according to a press release. By identifying wells that were overpumping or underpumping, controller set points were adjusted “with minimal human interference,” the release stated.
- legacy well optimization:
- pumping improvements (see article)
- workovers
- managing chokes
- it's not the highest EUR, but the highest IRR
- well refracturing
- Oasis experience in the Bakken (see article)
- artificial life trends (see article)
- analytics (see article) -- may be the biggest payoff
- well bashing -- relationship between "parent" and "child" (see article)
- again, Oasis in the Bakken
Oasis’ Reid said that in North Dakota the company is applying full-field development strategies, so Oasis does not have much activity cycling in the same area, which helps allay the effects of well bashing.
“We generally have one parent well in each of our DSUs, and when we come in for development drilling we are drilling out the full DSU at all depths in the Bakken and Three Forks to minimize future interference effects,” he said. “In addition, we are often refracking the parent well to improve its performance and to minimize the disruption to the new wells from a depleted parent well.”
The paper is not treating wells by year as identical. The whole point of the article is to test how different age (or location) affect performance. In order to look at wells by year as a variable, you need a sweep of wells across time.
ReplyDeleteI'll note that at the top of the blog entry. Thank you.
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