FracInsight Offers Better View of Where to Fracture Rock

Knowing where to place perforations and individual hydraulic fracturing stages remains a challenge for the oil and gas industry. As a result of incorrect hydraulic fracturing, approximately 25 to 30 percent of zones in unconventional wells don’t produce.

“We understand where we want to place and drill wells, but often, Mother Earth is complex,” said Dan Buller, global advisor and principal petrophysicist for unconventional reservoir optimization and formation & reservoir solutions at Halliburton. “Placing these horizontal wells exactly where they’re targeted is problematic sometimes. Once you’ve done the drilling and/or geosteering, you want to evaluate where you’ve penetrated the earth model. Once you penetrate, where are the optimal places to stage frac a well and to place perforations?”

To address this issue, the company created FracInsight, an unbiased repeatable tool that selects perforations and frac stage locations from the best available formation evaluation data along a horizontal well.

FracInsight can be used as a standalone product for building a local geomodel from available data, but was designed to fit within the Cypher 2.0 Seismic to Stimulation Service as a means of offering insight on where to frack, Buller said during a press conference Monday at the Society of Petroleum Engineers Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in Amsterdam.

This service is now available, with 11 analysts trained for deployment of FracInsight in North America, Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, said Buller, one of the creators of FracInsight.

The idea behind FracInsight is to eliminate wasted perforations and zones while maximizing production.

“We can take the data and do a better job of evaluating what’s changing in the rock along a horizontal well. “Without knowing where well is at and where you stimulating within geology, you can’t apply the reservoir models and completion model design. This is all about completion to feed reservoir and drainage.”