Lateral Proppant Distribution

An introduction to this significant technology for realizing effective fracture length can be found in IPT's landmark technical paper, SPE 56725: Lateral Proppant Distribution: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Putting Frac Jobs Away. Proppant induced friction can affect the lateral and vertical proppant distribution adjacent to the target interval and negatively affect the effective fracture length that is realized.

The concept is as follows: If proppant enters the fracture and changes the pressure character, then it is building proppant-induced friction. Premature proppant-induced friction can easily divert slurry injection away from the pay interval and there may be minimal indication of this on the observed treating pressure response. When this happens, fracture models can not predict the myriad of slurry diversion scenarios that can occur. At IPT, we design the fracture treatment to minimize proppant-induced friction from the beginning, noting of course that some reservoirs need to be packed for conductivity and/or consolidation purposes.

Proppant distribution is a key aspect typically ignored by most practitioners of this craft and it is a primary reason why most fracture stimulation treatments achieve less than expected effective fracture length. If simply "putting a job in the ground" continues to be the measure of a successful stimulation treatment, then the industry will continue to evolve in the direction of water fracs because a slick water treatment will produce similar or better than a poorly designed and implemented crosslinked gel job. A proppant distribution design is intended to minimize proppant induced friction and place proppant adjacent to the pay interval beyond the capabilities of most water frac type applications, thereby achieving an improved effective fracture length and production response.