Publications

Hydraulic Fracture treatments, if properly executed, can provide a major boost to productivity in low permeability reservoirs. A proper frac design is the key to success: Fracture length, aperture and height, fracture containment, proppant placement and the resulting fracture permeability all strongly depend on reservoir- and geomechanical properties. Hydraulic Fracturing is a relatively new development in many parts of Indonesia, so experience may be lacking. It does not help that Indonesia is a tectonically active region. Frac strategies that are successful elsewhere may fail in Indonesia, for instance due to anomalously high geological stresses. It is essential to have detailed knowledge of petrophysical and geomechanical formation properties, in particular permeability, Youngs modulus and Poissons ratio, pore pressure and the principal geological stresses of the reservoir and surrounding formations. Detailed knowledge of these parameters will ultimately have a major impact on the hydrocarbon production rates added by the treatment, and therefore on the lifelong economics of a well. In 2007 and 2008, Kondur Petroleum S.A. executed hydraulic fracture treatments in the K field, located onshore within the Malacca Strait Block, Riau Province, Sumatra. Although there was no previous fracturing experience in the field, the fractures were successfully placed and resulted in significant increases in production, easily meeting pre-job expectations. The key to this success was a tailored data acquisition program, followed by petrophysical analysis and geomechanical modeling, resulting in well founded frac designs. For every frac treatment, a Mechanical Earth Model (MEM) was constructed, based in particular on high quality full waveform sonic data from a recently introduced sonic tool, which provides unique geomechanical measurements. At the time of frac execution, pressure and other measurements confirmed the validity of the MEMs and the initial frac designs.