Woolsey Petroleum Receives DOE Grant
Woolsey Petroleum Corporation of Wichita, KS has been awarded funding through the Department of Energy's "Technology Development with Independents" program to study ways to improve hydraulic fracturing of Mississippian reservoirs in Kansas.
This project is a 12-month collaboration of Woolsey Petroleum and the Kansas Geological Survey. The proposed project will investigate geologic and engineering factors critical for designing hydraulic fracture treatments in Mississippian "chat" reservoirs. Mississippian reservoirs, including the chat, account for 1 billion barrels of the cumulative oil produced in Kansas. Mississippian reservoirs presently represent approximately 40% of the state's 35 million barrels annual production.
Although geographically widespread, the "chat" is a heterogeneous reservoir composed of chert, cherty dolomite, and argillaceous limestone. Fractured chert with micro-moldic porosity is the best reservoir in this 60- to 100-ft unit.
The chat will be cored in an infill well in the Medicine Lodge North field that was discovered in 1954 and has cumulative production of 2,626,858 bbls of oil and 7,692,010 mcf of gas. The core and modern wireline logs will provide geological and petrophysical data for designing a fracture treatment. Optimum hydraulic fracturing design is poorly defined in the chat, with poor correlation of treatment size to production increase. To establish new geologic and petrophysical guidelines for these treatments, data from core petrophysics, wireline logs, and oil-field maps will be input to a fracture- treatment simulation program. Parameters will be established for optimal size of the treatment and geologic characteristics of the predicted fracturing. The fracturing will be performed and subsequent wellsite tests will ascertain the results for comparison to predictions. A reservoir simulation program will then predict the rate and volumetric increase in production. Comparison of the predicted increase in production with that of reality, and the hypothetical fracturing behavior of the reservoir with that of its actual behavior, will serve as tests of the geologic & petrophysical characterization of the oil field. After this feedback, a second well will be cored and logged, and the procedure will be repeated to test characteristics determined to be critical for designing cost-effective fracture treatments.
The project will receive $75,000 of US Department of Energy funds to support reservoir characterization and technology transfer activities. Total project cost is $768,130.