On February 10th, Darcy hosted an operator-only discussion on current approaches and challenges to modeling Parent-Child interactions. The session was attended by over 400 individuals and featured short presentations from several Darcy members (Great Western, Hess, Birchcliff, and Devon) who provided their perspectives on the topic. The full video recording of the session and presentation slides are available for Darcy's E&P members here. If you are interested in participating and/or contributing to a future E&P rountable session please let our team know by filling out this form.

To kick off the session, Darcy and guest moderator, Robert Archer, gave an overview of the tools and methods currently available to the industry.

As is illustrated in the framework above, one of the most challenging aspects of modeling parent-child interactions is the wide range of commercially available modeling packages. To understand what tools currently are in use, a survey was collected during the session with the following results from 133 respondents.

Darcy members can view unblurred survey results here

While the data suggests that GOHFER remains the incumbent leader in market share, Resfrac has gained significant adoption since their founding in 2015. Resfrac's ability to couple well production and pressure depletion to geomechanics enables modeling parent-child interactions in a single package. While this can be done by dividing the workflow between a fracture modeling simluator, such as GOHFER, and a flow modeling simulator, such as CMG, the additional steps makes iteration of different scenarios more complex. In addition to workflow complexity, model accuracy was surveyed as being the biggest challenge to modeling parent-child interactions.

More wells in a fracture simulator mean more grid cells, more computational time, and more opportunity for non-uniqueness of solutions given the increased number of unknown rock and fracture parameters. With an average parent-child simulation currently involving 4 to 5 wells, the need to constrain models with data from the field is significant but costly to obtain.

Robust case studies, such as that presented at this roundtable by Craig Cipolla (Hess) using excerpts of URTeC 2899721 are invaluable sources of insight for the industry. Craig's concise overview of the work, which integrated microseismic data for a four well pad in the Bakken was well received at the session.

While these studies are critical for advancing the industry's parent-child modeling capabilities, there is also a need for scalable insights derived from more fundamental analysis. Zack Warren shared insights on Great Western Petroleum's use of simple production surveillance techniques to track the impact's of parent-child interactions. The talk generated significant Q&A and showed strong interest in a future roundtable on the topic.

If you are interested in participating and/or contributing to a future E&P rountable session please let our team know by filling out this form.