American Oil and Gas Reporter - October 2019 - 86

SpecialReport: Oil Field Chemistry

Oil Field Chemistry Marches Forward
By Colter Cookson

when they face challenges or need to improve their acreage's economics, says
Danielle Allen, senior vice president of
global communications and technology
commercialization for Flotek Industries
Inc. She attributes operators' growing
focus on chemistry to several trends.
"The publicly-traded oil and gas producers are focusing on profits rather than
production growth at the behest of their
shareholders," Allen observes. "They are
prioritizing capital efficiency, and chemistry is one of the most cost-effective
knobs producers can turn to get more
from their acreage."
In many plays, operators already have
pinpointed the optimal lateral lengths and
proppant intensities, suggests James Silas,
Flotek's senior vice president of research
and innovation. "Increasing lateral length
and proppant intensity appear to have
reached a point of diminishing returns in
many plays, including the Midland and
Delaware basins," he says. "That leaves
chemistry as one of the primary ways
operators can improve well economics."
Successful chemistry is tailored to the
reservoir, emphasizes Bill Hill, the company's vice president of basin and reservoir
chemistry. "The rock matrix, in situ water
and oil, and completion fluid all help determine which chemistries will be most
effective for meeting the operator's goals,"
he says. "For example, if the oil in a

Whether it is being included in completion fluids to reduce pumping pressures
or applied to an aging stripper well to
prevent equipment corrosion, chemistry
is vital to oil and gas production. It can
be tricky to find chemistries that are affordable, effective and compatible with
the chemicals, water, oil and rock they
will encounter.
Advances in chemistry are furthering
the quest for economic solutions. Equipped
with proven techniques for automating
costly experiments and evaluations, chemical providers say they are developing
better products for everything, from maximizing unconventional wells' initial production rates and treating fracturing flowback to optimizing waterfloods and reviving stripper wells.
These solutions frequently perform
better than their predecessors while minimizing safety risks and the industry's
impact on communities, service companies
report. They add that technology transfer
is alive and well. For example, one company says it is introducing the oil field to
a mixing technique long used in other
industries to boost chemicals' effectiveness
by hastening the point at which they
achieve peak efficiency.
Operators increasingly have the knowledge and interest to seek new chemistries
FIGURE 1

Wolfcamp A Well Performance
With and Without Reservoir-Centric Chemistry
Normalized BOE per Proppant Intensity (lb/ft)
17
16
15

12,000

Initial Well Count:
122 CnF® wells
240 Wells without CnF®

14
13
12

Complex nano-Fluid® (122 wells)

11,000

Without Complex nano-Fluid® (240 wells)

10,000
9,000
3-month BOE per 1,000' of Lateral

BOE per Proppant Intensity (lb/ft)

Population Averages

Complex nano-Fluid®
Without Complex nano-Fluid®

11
10
9
8
7
6
5

7,464 BOE/1,000'
1,622 lbs/ft

8,000
7,000
6,000

6,679 BOE/1,000'
1,670 lbs/ft

5,000
4,000
3,000
2,000

4
3
2
1

1,000
0

0
5
Data Source: RS Energy

10

15

20

25

w/o CnF®

35

Total Months on Production

Well Completion Parameters
CnF®

30

Proppant Intensity (lbs/ft)
Lateral Length (ft)
Proppant Intensity (lbs/ft)
Lateral Length (ft)

Avg
1,622
8,694
1,670
7,993

Wells with completion dates between 1/2016-12/2017

86 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

1,000

1,100 1,200

1,300

1,400 1,500 1,600 1,700 1,800
Proppant Intensity (lb/ft)

1,900

2,000

reservoir has a high paraffin content, it
makes sense to include more solvents
and increased detergency."
Improving Predictability
"Unconventional reservoirs' characteristics vary far more than the industry
once assumed," Hill adds. "When we
look at cuttings from laterals, we often
see changes in the rock matrix chemistry
from the heel to the toe. If we want a
treatment to deliver the expected results,
it needs to be robust enough to accommodate those changes."
It's possible for generic, one-size-fitsall solutions to work, but their results
tend to be inconsistent, Hill warns. "Data
from across basins shows a reduction in
production variability and uncertainty in
the wells that are treated using a reservoir-centric approach," he reports. "More
predictable results make it easier for operators to allocate capital."
To show how beneficial reservoir-centric
completion chemistry can be, Hill shares
a comparison of two four-well pads in
Karnes County, Tx. All eight wells targeted
the Lower Eagle Ford and had lateral
lengths around 5,000 feet, comparable
proppant intensities, and similar separation
distances from the nearest lateral.
The wells completed using proprietary
blended surfactants and solvents tailored
to the reservoir had a cumulative 12month production of 88,413 barrels of
oil equivalent for every 1,000 feet of
lateral, Hill relates. The other wells employed more intense completions, with
an average 883 pounds of proppant
pumped per foot rather than 771 pounds.
Nevertheless, they only delivered 50,837
boe per 1,000 feet of lateral, almost half
as much as the ones with reservoir-centric
chemistry, according to public data provided by RS Energy.
The benefits of tailoring chemistry to
the reservoir are visible in much larger
datasets, Hill assures. As an example, he
cites a study of wells targeting the Wolfcamp A in the Texas counties of Midland,
Martin and Upton. The study included
122 wells treated with a reservoir-centric
blend of solvents and surfactants and 240
wells completed using other chemistries.
"The wells were completed around
the same time, so they had similar lateral
lengths and proppant intensities," Hill
says. "The ones treated with reservoir-
American Oil and Gas Reporter - October 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Oil and Gas Reporter - October 2019
