Frac Fingerprint: The whole purpose of Petro.ai is finding the truth in unconventionals. Evidence, like a Frac Fingerprint, doesn’t lie. Based on the stress profile, offset wells, and trained on diagnostic data, the Frac Fingerprint is a calculated area indicating probabilistic stimulation gradients around the well. The Frac Fingerprint can also use frac simulator inputs for well performance prediction.
Petro.ai: We have the tools and the team to make your FSI, Frac Scene Investigation, give up the truth. It’s our kind of mess.
The way we understood fracking years ago is significantly different from the way we understand fracking today. It’s a new world based on new evidence. And much like the procedural advances in CSI (2000) to the new CSI: Vegas (2021)*, frac scene investigation has changed from a type-curve driven analysis to a geomechanically derived assessment that has led Petro.ai to produce their newest proprietary tool, Frac Fingerprint.
“One of the differentiating technologies that Petro.ai has when it’s building an AI model to predict the productivity of a pad or a pad design,” Dr. Brendon Hall, VP of Geoscience at Petro.ai describes, “is the Frac Fingerprinting technology which was designed in collaboration with Dr. Mark Zoback, our science advisor from Stanford University.
Given a stress profile input, the Frac Fingerprint tells you the probability that an area was stimulated when a well is fracked.
The shape of the hydraulic fracture is determined in large part by the stress profile, but the way we’ve come up with these fingerprints is linking that stress profile with observations of the rock that’s been stimulated.”
Kyle LaMotta, VP of Analytics adds, “Right. We’re not defining boundaries on how far you’ve stimulated but giving you a probability and a distance. Right next to the well, if you’re thinking about it in gun barrel space, if you look at the wellbore for a given stage, you’re 100% sure that right around that wellbore it was stimulated but as you get further away that probability decreases.
“Let’s say you have two wells right next to each other. They’re going to have independent frac fingerprints. But the drainage between them is going to be shared. So, we have to draw a boundary between the wells for the drainage. You’re getting a double stimulation from two wells that are right next to each other if those frac fingerprints are overlapping. But the drainage is not going to overlap, it’s going to go to one well or the other.”
LaMotta continues, "The center frame in the picture above, is what we’re calling the Frac Fingerprint. Each of the screen dots represents a well and the yellow indicates the area of highest probability for the frac stimulation. You’re seeing the ensemble of the Frac Fingerprints together.
“This picture represents three different scenarios with different spacings. With the closely spaced wells on the left, you can see how they’re sharing that yellow highlighted area. As the wells get spaced apart, they’re more independent resulting in discrete yellow probability areas versus one large yellow region.The yellow shows the highest areas of probability of stimulation.The purple ombre indicates increasingly lower gradations of probability.
“The Frac Fingerprint is used in the Pad Designer and in the Frac Hit App. In the picture above, we see the Pad Designer App used to create a theoretical pad and the subsequent analysis to see how valuable it is.The stick plot on the left indicates the location of the proposed pad that’s being analyzed. The top image in the center section shows the six wells and the heavy overlay between the Frac Fingerprints for each of those wells. Below, we slice up the drainage area into specific, differently colored shapes representing the drainage area for that well.”
“The advanced AI that’s being used here,” Hall explains, “is taking the stress profile and training the Frac Fingerprint technology using microseismic, simulation, tracers, pressure response and other diagnostics to create this cutting-edge technology.
“There are frac simulators that do similar things. They’re more of a physics approach where you’re trying to simulate the exact properties of the rock. The Petro.ai Frac Fingerprint is more of a data driven approach where we’re honoring the geomechanics of the rock.
“It lets you get these Frac Fingerprints in a very quick and efficient manner to evaluate a lot of scenarios, to look at what-if cases. Most frac simulators work slowly and require a lot of inputs so that it’s hard to collect all the data that you need to run them.
“With the Petro.ai platform Designer Pad, we can also incorporate all the inputs of a frac simulator. So, if someone is running a frac simulator we can build those results into our Frac Fingerprint technology. That’s an important point because a lot of people run these frac simulators and don’t have a hard way of incorporating that input back into a useful, practical workflow that comes up with a performance prediction.”
* CSI is the flashy, gritty most-watched drama in the world that finds the evidence to bring the truth in each episode. And that evidence, much of the time, turns on a fingerprint. Petro.ai has built its own geomechanics lab for your FSI with Frac Fingerprint in Pad Designer. You need the evidence to break your rock mystery and we’re on the frontlines incorporating all that science to bring you to the truth.
