Lets Talk Petrophysical, Microseismic and Geomechanics
Poland’s natural gas gap makes an opening for shale gas
Poland’s gap between natural gas consumption and production is truly an opportunity, according to Adrian Topham, Reservoir Evaluation Product Line Manager at Baker Hughes. His presentation at Shale Gas Results in Europe 2011 in Warsaw, Poland was entitled Applying lessons from North America to European Shale Plays, but the first stop in his journey was there in Poland.
“They take a pragmatic and subsurface view of the world,” he said of the US Energy Information Administration whose graph plotted Poland’s gas production and consumption from 1980-2009.
“The difference between consumption and production is growing,” noted Topham whose slide added “The latest increase shows the opening opportunities to provide Poland with further gas supply.”
Unconventional gas looked to be the answer. Current shale gas activity in Poland was depicted on a map from a GIS database.
Topham also outlined the six known basins in Poland as well as the shale targets including the Cambrian Shale Dictyonema facies, bearing type II kerogen.
He commented on the Carboniferous Play: Fore-Sudetic Monocline, saying: “It is perhaps the second most active, based on a marine shale play, and has type II/III kerogen. It’s been the source of many conventional gas fields. Thermal maturity is more in the gas window, and it has a high silica content.”
Topham showed a color-coded map of the Fore-Sudetic Monocline which showed values like depth and TOC percentages.
He said, “We’ve put together these kinds of montages based on public data from PGNiG and Polish institutes. It is a sparse data set and as an industry we’ll fill it in. The difficulty is going to be sharing it.”
Then he pledged to provide some lessons learned from shale gas drilling experiences in North America, showing an R&D project in the lower Devonian-Huron in the northeast of the US. “It’s a rich data set, it’s got lots of petrophysical, microseismic and geomechanics data. The object was to get new insights through the use of new technology,” he said.
Within the project’s data summary, three wells were completed with port & packer type completion, one well was cased and cemented; four horizontals were hydraulically fractured with nitrogen, and one with proppant.
Topham said a range of different completion techniques were used.
“By using these combinations of factors we can get some understanding of what’s going on.”
He showed microseismic of the third well: “They’ve managed to identify that some of the events were happening in well number one as well.”
Topham spoke about the correlations between microseismic and pumping.
“There are two patterns to the fracturing and stimulation at this well,” he explained. “High pressure is increasing over time. We see more production from the heel rather than the toe. It’s a whole combination of linking different data together rather than just blindly fracturing.”
He listed the top best industry practices to help with drainage and production rate.
Technical solutions were presented: novel techniques and products that are available now. Topham gave a rundown of oil field services offered by Baker Hughes, including reservoir management, rock mechanics, and reservoir consulting/engineering. He also showed the integration of 3D data using a single database, taking into account a geological model, petrophysics, geomechanics, reservoir simulation and microseismic.
Topham gave a brief introduction to Baker Hughes tools like FracXplorer, which offers Realtime frack monitoring on one’s desktop, optimizes completion procedures during the frac job, and can identify frack fluid thief zones such as faults.
Via the AutoTrak™ Curve Rotary Steerable System – accelerated process that allows us to do this more quickly
In terms of “Plug & Perf” drilling, Topham questioned the industry standard technique for which he said10-30 stages were common.
“Is it economic?” he asked. “How many stages do you really need? Should we be careful how many we place? You know you won’t get [high] production from some of your fracture stages, but you can’t leave them out.”
He offered a “drop ball” method, the Next Generation FracPoint Completion System, which he said had the ability to use metal balls in an open hole system. Acid, he said, was subsequently poured down the hole to degrade these.