Enhanced understanding improves "child well" performance

To better understand child well performance issues, the service company conducted a comprehensive study in 2017 (SPE 189875) across 10 major U.S. unconventional plays, including Bakken/Three Forks, Barnett, Bone Springs, Eagle Ford, Fayetteville, Haynesville, Marcellus, Niobrara, Wolfcamp and Woodford, Fig. 1. [...]because the information is not available in public sources, the study did not consider all completion components, such as openhole versus cased-hole, number of stages, perforation cluster spacing and fluid type, differences in flowback, production practices or artificial lift techniques. Completing the well closest to the parent well and then working outward from there also could reduce the potential negative impact caused by parent well depletion on non-adjacent child wells. * Optimizing completion designs by modeling the depletion effects can be a viable predictive tool for infill drilling, and proppant volumes and well spacing can be adjusted accordingly to maximize the return on capital deployed, as operators don't want to over- or undercapitalize an area. * Additionally, the use of near-wellbore and far-field chemical diversion techniques can help increase child well production while limiting interwell communication. Figure 3 shows a 15%-to-50% increase in child well production when using BroadBand Shield service versus the average of the other child wells in the area (URTeC 2670497). * In some cases, refracturing the parent well before completing the offset child wells can boost production in both the parent and child wells. * Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) also may increase production in both the parent and child wells.