A Simple Physics-Based Model Predicts Oil Production from Thousands of Horizontal Wells in Shales

Abstract

Over the last six years, crude oil production from shales and ultra-deep GOM in the United States has accounted for most of the net increase of global oil production. Therefore, it is important to have a good predictive model of oil production and ultimate recovery in shale wells. Here we introduce a simple model of producing oil and solution gas from the horizontal hydrofractured wells. This model is consistent with the basic physics and geometry of the extraction process. We then apply our model thousands of wells in the Eagle Ford shale.

Given well geometry, we obtain a one-dimensional nonlinear pressure diffusion equation that governs flow of mostly oil and solution gas. In principle, solutions of this equation depend on many parameters, but in practice and within a given oil shale, all but three can be fixed at typical values, leading to a nonlinear diffusion problem we linearize and solve exactly with a scaling