Descriptive Data Analytics to Investigate Stimulation and Completion Trendsin the United States: How Proppant and Water Utilization have Changed overTime?

摘要

The United States hydraulic fracturing and completion activities have seen a paradigm shift in the pumpedwater and proppant volumes along the increasing completed lateral over time. Hydraulic fracturing hasbecome the most dominant treatment in North America to tap the unconventional resources. Large scaleanalysis of the completion size in terms of the amount of proppant, water, and lateral length trends over theperiod of 2011 and 2018 is presented in this paper. The objective of this study is to elucidate the completiontrends over time and to summarize the average values of the completion and stimulation parameters. It willput the readers’ mind in perspective of how much proppant and water have been utilized over the years andshine a light on the progression of the industry growing demand on water and proppant. Data from FracFocus website, which serves as an official chemical disclosure registry for many of theoil and gas states, were utilized in this study. For each stimulated well, it reports water volume and masspercentage of proppant and all other chemical ingredients. The raw data were scraped, parsed, and cleanedusing advanced statistical and validation approaches to extract useful information out of the noisy data. Adatabase of more than 80,000 wells was built and integrated into this study. Proppant total mass and theconcentration of other chemical ingredients were calculated. The obtained new variables were coupled withother completion parameters such as the horizontal length, perforated lateral length, and well types. The data of each parameter were subjected to rigorous quality control and inspected for outliers. Afterpassing all the data quality and validation procedures, an advanced data visualization technique was selectedto reflect the trends over time. The overall trends of the whole aggregated United States are presented inthis paper. Investigating the created visualizations showed that there is an undeniable increasing trend inthe amount of the proppant and water being consumed over the investigated period.