Production Trends of Shale Gas Wells

To obtain better well performance and improved production from shale gas reservoirs, it is important to understand the behavior of shale gas wells and to identify different flow regions in them over a period of time. It is also important to understand best fracture and stimulation practice to increase productivity of wells. These objectives require that accurate production analysis be performed. For accurate production analysis, it is important to analyze the production behavior of wells, and field production data should be interpreted in such a way that it will identify well parameters. This can be done by performing a detailed analysis on a number of wells over whole reservoirs. This study is an approach that will lead to identifying different flow regions in shale gas wells that include linear and bilinear flow. Important field parameters can be calculated from those observations to help improve future performance. The detailed plots of several wells in this study show some good numbers for linear and bilinear flow, and some unique observations were made. The purpose of this work is to also manage the large amount of data in such a way that they can be used with ease for future studies. A program was developed to automate the analysis and generation of different plots. The program can also be used to perform the simple calculations to calculate different parameters. The goal was to develop a friendly user interface that would facilitate reservoir analysis. Examples were shown for each flow period, i.e. linear and bilinear flow. Different plots were generated (e.g; Bob Plot (square root of time plot) and Fourth Root of Time Plot, that will help in measuring slopes and thus reservoir parameters such as fracture permeability and drainage area. Different unique cases were also observed that show a different behavior of well in one type of plot from another.