Fracture Evaluation & Design System: Making of 3D Hydraulic Frac Simulator
22 February 2016: I was on a training course on hydraulic fracturing to advance my skills in hydraulic fracturing design & quality control. Training meant that I did not have to visit office every day for the week, and was also relieved of the day-to-day workload. I was very excited, more for the fact that I didn’t have to work for the whole week rather than for the training itself.
But who knew, this training will be a turning point in my career. It set a perspective, gave meaning to my profession and sowed the seeds of ProPetra.
So what interesting could have happened in a standard 05 day training course? Lets find out..
The farmer
The course was taught by a frac veteran, who had seen the birth of this industry all the way to its peak days. He knew ins and outs, everything from design, materials selection, executing the jobs, tweaks and short cuts. You name it he knew it. But such is the case with many frac experts in the US, as this is a very isolated field, whoever enters the fracking industry becomes a master of frac but doesnot know anything else in petroleum or reservoir engineering.
This gentlemen, also had a unique achievement, he was one of early authors of the industry standard Fracturing simulator, FracPro. Out of curiosity, in one of the lunch breaks, we started discussing the principles behind step-down rate test, and its modeling to estimate near-wellbore & perforation friction (check our awesome blog on step-down rate test). The topic seemed close to his heart, he got excited, started drawing graphs and ultimately, post lunch, showed me an amazingly formatted excel sheet that did step-down rate test calculations. He literally exclaimed “this is FracPro entry friction analysis, exactly, ditto, down to the dot.” He went on with his explanation of each graph and the formulas he was using in the spreadsheet cells.
But there, I had lost him. I had lost him when he said that a key module of an industry standard software was there, perfectly designed on a mere spreadsheet. It was a Eureka! Moment, my mind was flushing with ideas of creating my own frac simulator! This great farmer, had sowed a seed of creating my very own simulator, in my mind.. just by showing his excel sheet!
The Seed
So I got home, and started visualizing my own hydraulic frac simulator. I had no idea about the basics, the physics, mathematics, programming language, layout, architecture. It was nothing more than an idea, like what we have a lot of times and we forget about it after few days. However, this one was more concrete, I could feel my genuine intention to undertake this project.
In next couple of days, after speaking with people familiar with fracking and software development, I outlined the different modules this simulator will contain. Following schematic is a photograph I took of the sketching board when I first outlined the modules of this simulator. When I look at it today, I still feel surprised as to the journey we have completed and how far we have traveled.
The Plant
The main research, design, programming and testing journey took almost a year, 09 months to be precise. Although some modules of this simulator were quite basic, it took us great deal of time to learn and adapt to coding in Visual Basic, VBA & generating custom formulas for excel.
We had started the journey to simply replicate the working of a frac simulator in excel, without adding or innovating anything in the process. However, as we progressed in our research of this topic, its applicability, assumptions of different published models, we identified huge opportunities to optimize the process, modify the models and enhance the overall frac design & evaluation workflow. All of a sudden, we became a software development team from a bunch of engineers trying to replicate model equations in excel.
The first polished product turned out in the shape of Fracture Evaluation & Design System or FEDS in-short. FEDS is a numerical frac simulator, that can design, evaluate and quality check frac treatments in conventional & un-conventional reservoirs. FEDS has a fully coupled compositional & black-oil PVT module, fully integrated nodal analysis module and advanced production prediction workflow. The niche, that differentiates FEDS from other commercial simulators is the Psuedo-3D frac model it uses to simulate frac geometry and Dimensionless Fracture Conductivity, called Quasi-3D Frac Model. Further FEDS is the only frac simulator under development that integrates the entire reservoir, frac, wellbore & topside models in one synergized modelling environment to predict the performance of a frac (well) in most realistic conditions.
Further blogs in this Blog Series will outline in detail, how FEDS was designed, what are under-the-hood calculations and how every iteration of the software added new features & functionality. I plan to write and explain in detail, how a mere idea can be turned into finished product by people that have minimum technical knowledge in software development.
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