Accounting for near-wellbore fracture behavior to unlock the potential of unconventional gas wells

Despite ongoing engineering efforts, unconventional horizontal gas wells completed with the multi-stage hydraulic fracturing technique are not yet producing to their full potential, as a meaningful proportion of clusters are producing marginally - if at all. In this paper, we advocate that the near-wellbore behavior of the fractures could explain some of that behavior. We propose a method involving a test well completed with the pin-point fracturing technique to sample the variability in the near-wellbore behavior. With the help of a dedicated fully coupled hydraulic fracturing simulator, we show that the optimum number of clusters per stage can be selected taking into account this new information. The various steps of this method are illustrated with an example.