API OKC Monthly Meeting: February 11th 2021

400 Vermont Ave,Oklahoma City OK 73108

11 February, 2021

Description

Lateral Science: A cost-effective approach for engineered completions Commonly accepted best practices in North America's shale basins deliver inconsistent production results because of a lack of rock properties and in-situ stress state understanding along the laterals. Such parameters are difficult to obtain and would require expensive logging operations in horizontal wellbores. Therefore, most completions are designed geometrically, with little or no concern for rock heterogeneity. This often leads to severe variability in productivity between offset wells. In this presentation I illustrate a cost-effective methodology that enables operators to engineer their completions designs starting from commonly available drilling measurements and mud motor parameters to derive the Mechanical Specific Energy (MSE), which is an excellent proxy for the Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS), a key parameter involved with the initial rock breakdown. The MSE drives a facies-based discretization of the rock along the laterals that enables the operator to position perforation clusters in mechanically-comparable intervals, so that they breakdown at a common treating pressure, resulting in augmented perforation cluster efficiency and uniform fluid placement within each fracture stage. This gain is key for significant productivity improvement without any significant increased cost or added operational complexity. Matteo Marongiu-Porcu is as Director of Reservoir Technologies at NexTier. Prior to NexTier, from 2018 – 2020 Mr. Marongiu-Porcu worked for Chesapeake Energy where he served as Completions Engineering Advisor. He is an internationally acknowledged technology leader and innovator, with a track record of success developing and implementing cutting-edge technologies to optimize production from conventional and unconventional oilfield assets. Mr. Marongiu-Porcu started his career in 2002, when he joined the Italian National oil company (Eni E&P). In 2011 he joined Economides Consultants in Houston, TX where he served as Associate Partner until 2014, when he joined Schlumberger in Houston, TX and held a variety of roles in the consulting segment focusing on the integration of multiple technical domains such as completions and reservoir engineering, geoscience, petrophysics and geomechanics. Matteo holds a Ph.D. in Petroleum Engineering from Texas A&M University, a Master of Science in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Houston and a National Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan.