Good fracturing practices have been developed over the past 50 years and have been applied across a great variety of formations worldwide. With advent of horizontal multi-stage fracturing, many good frac practices are being ignored or abandoned. “Overdisplacement doesn’t matter in our horizontal completions,” is a comment I have commonly heard over the past several years. Now we find that operators working in a number of basins around the world experiencing production decline rates that are faster than expected. This is causing a disparity between predicted reserve recovery and actual production performance. While there may be a number of reasons for this, it is our belief that this is due in part to abandonment of good fracturing practices. Issues like near wellbore conductivity are all but ignored in many horizontal completion techniques. This talk will present compelling data as to what why good fracturing practices are still important and how they can be applied in today's resource plays.

 

Dan Themig is CEO of Packers Plus Energy Services headquartered in Calgary, Alberta Canada. He has served in various engineering and technical positions in the U.S. and Canada and has been involved in advanced horizontal and multilateral projects worldwide. He has a B.Sc. in Engineering from the University of Illinois and an MBA from Oklahoma State University. He is a registered professional engineer and a member of SPE.