In tight gas sand provinces such as the Rocky Mountain region of North America, more than 90 percent of new wells require hydraulic fracturing to be economic. With the growing development of marginal multiple pay tight gas sands, economic completions have become more difficult. Continued improvements in evaluation and completion technologies for multiple pay intervals is essential to meet an operator’s economic criteria. For operators with a large drilling program, one solution has been the development of a “factory” approach to drilling and completing wells. While this approach provides economic benefit in reducing cycle time and economy-of-scale savings, it is not without complication. Some factors that affect the economic optimization of a well completion for the factory approach are:

• Determining well productivity from logs
• Completing multiple pay intervals during the initial completion process
• Determining which multiple-pay fracture treatment technique to use
• Timely fracture treatment recommendations for a high volume of work
• Evaluating production results and adopting improvements

This presentation will discuss how these five factors are currently being addressed, with focus on the Rockies. The overall process will be reviewed as a holistic approach to well completion and optimization. The presentation will emphasize the different completion techniques being used throughout the Rockies. Operational difficulties of high volume operations also will be discussed. Actual case study data will be presented showing the benefits of this approach.

People attending this presentation will become very familiar with the variety of different fracturing techniques being used in completing multiple pay tight gas sands.