SPE 91755
Fast Method Finds Infill Drilling Potentials in Mature-Tight Reservoirs
L. Guan, SPE, Texas A&M University, and Y. Du, SPE, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
Copyright 2004, Society of Petroleum Engineers Inc.
This paper was prepared for presentation at the 2004 SPE International Petroleum Conference
in Mexico held in Puebla, Mexico, 8–9 November 2004.
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Abstract
Infill drilling has been identified to play an important role in
improving oil or gas recovery in the tight hydrocarbon fields.
But quantifying the infill drilling potentials in producing tight
hydrocarbon fields is often a challenging problem, due to large
variability in rock quality, well spacing, well completion
practices, and the large number of wells involved. At the same
time, with the increasing demand for energy and favorable oil
and gas prices, more and more fields all over the world are
undergoing infill drilling. It is not uncommon for a company
to have hundreds or thousands of infill candidates to choose
from. Complete integrated reservoir studies to determine infill
potential are often very time-consuming and costly for many
tight hydrocarbon fields.
This paper presents an alternative approach to conduct
detailed reservoir studies to find infill drilling potentials in
tight hydrocarbon basins. This method can quickly evaluate
the infill drilling potentials within weeks even with thousands
of wells. Several field examples are provided to demonstrate
the application of the method in mature-tight gas basins and
the primary advantages of the technique are its speed and
reliance upon well location and production data only.
Introduction
As the world’s supply of conventional oil and gas reservoirs
begins to deplete in the 21st century, the world will demand
that oil and gas production from unconventional reservoirs
increase to help supply keep up with demand. One of the keys
to ensuring an abundant, economical, and environmentally-
friendly supply of natural gas is developing the tremendous
gas resources in unconventional, low-permeability, tight
reservoirs. Although the average production rate of gas wells
from the unconventional, low-permeability, tight reservoirs is
low, they still play an important role in the petroleum industry.
According to the 2003 released Interstate Oil and Gas
Compact Commission (IOGCC) survey,1 the tight gas wells
collectively represent 10 percent of the natural gas produced
onshore in the lower 48 states which accounts for 43 percent
of the overall rise in natural gas production over the year
2002, and tight oil production increased by 7,678,000 barrels
in 2002 to 323,777,000 barrels while the overall domestic
onshore oil production declined.
However, the low-permeability wells are being produced
not by major oil companies, for the most part, by small
independent operators. Research is the key to the survival of
those low-permeability wells; however, those small
independent producers do not have the means to conduct their
own research. Faced with the daunting task of trying to
determine where to drill several hundred infill wells in a tight-
gas reservoir, many operators have to rely on very simple
analyses to select infill locations. This often results in wells
being drilled in the wrong locations, and even worse, after
seeing less-than-expected infill performance, many operators
will simply give up on infill drilling and this may be missing
significant opportunities.
Infill drilling of additional wells after initial development
(primary and/or secondary) played an important role in
improving the oil and gas recovery in the tight hydrocarbon
reservoirs.2 Generally speaking, the reservoir heterogeneity
and layer continuity can be changed by the well spacing. The
infill drilling wells reduce the well spacing of the hydrocarbon
fields and then enhance the well connectivity. Wu, et al.3
reported the results of their study to determine the impact of
infill drilling on the waterflood recovery in West Texas
carbonate reservoir. Their study shows a certain degree of
correlation between the waterflood recovery and well spacing.
Recently, with the increasing demand for energy and
favorable oil and gas prices, more and more fields all over the
world are undergoing infill drilling. Although the advances in
reservoir management provides a much clear picture of
hydrocarbon distribution in the reservoirs which helps
petroleum engineers to plan highly effective well profiles. The
advanced imaging technologies allow the hydrocarbon field
operators to select the best locations for infill drilling to
optimize well placement. But what happens when we face a
mature tight field which has hundreds or even thousands of
developing wells? Usually, it is not uncommon for a company
to have hundreds or thousands of infill candidates to choose
from in the tight hydrocarbon fields.
The conventional way to determine infill-drilling potential
in a gas basin is to conduct a complete reservoir evaluation
involving geological, geophysical, and reservoir analyses and
interpretations. This includes developing a geological model
of the target area, estimating distributions of static reservoir
2 SPE 91755

properties such as porosity and permeability, constructing and
calibrating a reservoir simulation model of the area, and then
using the reservoir model to predict future production and
reserves at potential infill well locations. While it may be
accurate, this approach can be prohibitively time-consuming
and expensive. For some large, low-permeability gas basins
with large data sets (sometimes over 1,000 wells) and complex
geology, the cost and time requirements of a conventional
reservoir evaluation study are not acceptable.
As an alternative approach to conducting detailed studies,
various authors have used empirical or statistical analyses to
model variable well performance.4-12 In particular, McCain et
al.7 used a statistical, moving-window method to determine
demonstrated to correlate well with long-term production,8
shown in Fig. 3. Virgin best year, VBY, is the BY of a well at
virgin conditions. Depletion effects are removed by computing
the BY of a local area at a time before depletion using a 2D
regression of BY vs. well start date. VBY is used as a proxy
for kh in the pseudosteady state flow equation. In this method,
well spacing is used as a proxy for drainage area and is
calculated from the area of voronoi polygon around each well
based on well locations.
10,000
Maximum Month

Monthly Production (Mscf)

infill potential in a complex, low-permeability gas reservoir.
Later, Voneiff and Cipolla8 applied a similar method to Best Year
analyze well location and production data for rapid assessment
of infill and recompletion potential in the Ozona field.
Guan et al.13-15 first evaluated the accuracy of the
alternative method. The objectives of this work is to disuss the
accuracy of the fast method for selecting infill candidate wells
12-Month
in low permeability gas reservoirs and provide application
Window
guidelines for this fast method. Several field applications will
be discussed at the end of this paper.
1,000
The Methodology 1975 1977 1979 1981 1983
The fast method employed in this work is an extension of the
moving window method described by Voneiff and Cipolla.8 It Date
is similar in that it consists of a multitude of local analyses, Fig. 2 - Illustration of BY.8
each in an areal window centered around an existing well,
shown in Fig. 1. 10,000

1,000
Production (MMscf)
10-Year Cumulative

100

10

0.1
0.01 0.1 1 10 100

Fig. 1 - Diagram of the fast method showing how the window Monthly Rate During Best Year (MMscf/M)
moves across area. The small blue circles are the well
locations and big circles are the moving domains. Fig. 3 - Best Year vs. 10-year cumulative production.8
In this work, however, a more rigorous, model-based
Regression coefficients for each window are determined
analysis is employed in each moving domain. The model is
by regressing the parameters (well spacing, Gp/A, VBY) for
based on a combination of the material balance equation and
the wells within each window. The windows are limited in
the pseudosteady state flow equation, simplified by assuming
size, e.g., 3000 acres, and generally contain 5 to 20 wells. If
that many properties are constant within an individual moving
the number of wells in a window is less than a minimum
domain. The result is a linear regression equation that is
value, e.g., 3-5, a regional or global regression is used instead
applied within each window.
of a local regression.
In this rigorous, model-based method, BY is used as a
Once the regression equation coefficients are determined
proxy for production rate in the pseudosteady state flow
for each window, performance can be estimated for infill wells
model. BY, bestyear, is simply the best 12 consecutive months
by substituting the appropriate values for candidate infill well
of production divided by 12, shown in Fig. 2 and it has been
conditions. The result of this analysis is a prediction of BY for
SPE 91755 3

a new infill well offsetting each existing well. The primary 100
advantages of the moving domain technique are its speed and 95
its reliance upon only well location and production data. It is 90
85
routinely used to conduct infill screening studies of projects
80
consisting of 1000’s of wells and can be used to evaluate an 75
entire basin in a few man-days. 70
65
60
Generation of Test Permeability Fields and 55
Production Data Sets 50

We selected an area which had 100 wells from a real field in 45

40
Canada and used realistic distributions of well spacing and 35
first production date of the 100 wells. To create synthetic 30
production data sets for testing, we first generated 25
20
permeability distributions for input to a gas reservoir 15
simulator. To investigate the effects of heterogeneity, we 10
created four cases, one homogeneous reservoir and three 5
0
heterogeneous reservoirs, defined on a 54x54x1 simulation 08/17/2001 00:00:00 14124.0000 days
grid. For the four cases, the average permeabilities are the Fig. 4 - Simulation well region.
same, 0.2 md. Case 1 is the homogeneous reservoir. For Cases
2-4, we used a log-normal distribution to generate a base Effect of Heterogeneity
random permeability field. To determine the effect of heterogeneity on the estimation
To obtain fields with different degrees of heterogeneity, accuracy from the fast method, we compared the results from
we took running averages of the permeability distribution, the fast method and reservoir simulation. We compared the
using different averaging areas for each of Cases 2-4. The infill best year estimates for each case since it has been
reservoir becomes more heterogeneous as the case number demonstrated to correlate well with long production.
increases. The number and locations of existing wells, Therefore, it is used as a proxy for production potential in the
porosity, reservoir pressure, skin, and reservoir fluid fast method.
properties were the same for all four cases. The results show the averages of infill BYs from the fast
We next ran the simulator to generate the 100 wells’ method and simulation for different degrees of reservoir
production history, which was analyzed using the moving heterogeneity. Despite instances of large errors in estimation of
domain technique to estimate infill well performance. The infill performance for individual wells, the fast method predicts
reservoir history included wells starting at different dates over the average infill-well performance very well. The average
an approximately 40-year period to represent several rounds of relative error ranges from -11.2% to +2.3% for the four cases,
infill drilling. and Fig. 5 shows the results comparison from Case 2.

Accuracy of the Methodology

To determine how well the fast method predicts infill well 2200
Infill BY from simulation, MSCM/M

-50% -30%
performance, it was first necessary to determine the true infill 2000
well performance from simulation. To do this, we placed a 1800
new well in the first grid block and made a 1-year projection, 1600
from the end of history, to determine the production to be 1400
+30%
gained by a new well in this location. We then repeated this 1200
for each grid block in the system, thus generating a map, or
1000
distribution, of the additional production attributable to one +50%

800
new well at all the possible grid locations in the reservoir.
600
The infill-well performance estimates from simulation are
400
on a cell basis, while the fast method results are on a well
basis. Therefore, the simulation results must be converted to a 200

well basis. To do this we first determined, for each well, the 0

region consisting of all simulation cells closer to that well than
to any other well. For unbounded wells, we limited the search
radius of the circular region to correspond approximately to
the maximum search area used in the fast method analysis,
3,000 acres. Fig. 4 illustrates the calculated well regions. The
next step was to calculate a new-well cumulative production
for each region from the individual cell values. We used the
arithmetic average of new well BY over all the cells in each
well’s simulation region as the standard for comparison and
took it as the infill BY calculated from the simulation.
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 2200
Infill BY from fast method, MSCM/M
Fig. 5 - Comparison of infill BY from the fast method and
simulation for Case 2. The results from the fast method correlate
well with reservoir simulation.
The fast method appears to provide a conservative
estimate of average infill-well performance. For all the cases
studied in this work, the estimated average infill performance
is either very close to or below the simulated values. It is clear
4 SPE 91755
that, as the reservoir becomes more heterogeneous, the
predictions of infill well potential become more scattered and
the moving domain results become less accurate.
Effect of Average Permeability
The average permeability of Cases 1 to 4 is 0.2 md. To
determine the effect of permeability level on the estimation
results, we also ran another homogeneous reservoir case. We
increased the average permeability to 1.0 md and compared
the results with the 0.2md reservoir case.
For the 0.2 md Case 1, the average infill BY from the fast
method is 513 MSCM/M and the average infill BY from
simulation is 543 MSCM/M in Case 1. Thus, on average, the
fast method underestimates the infill BY by about 6%. This
small error is noteworthy, considering that the reservoir has
experienced depletion resulting in a 12% decrease in well
productivity.
But for the 1.0 md homogenous case, the error increases.
The estimates become more scattered in this case and several
wells differ by more than 50% from the simulated values. The
fast method underestimates the average infill BY by 25% for
this case. The larger error is attributed to greater depletion,
40% for the 1.0 md case, which results when only
permeability is increased and other reservoir parameters
remain the same.
Effect of Search Area
The default value for the local search area in the fast method is
3,000 acres. To find the effect of the search area, we varied the
search areas from 1,000 to 12,000 acres in the analysis of Case
3 and the result is presented in Fig. 6.
It seems that the smaller domain size results are better for
this case. Generally speaking, there is a larger variation in
reservoir properties in bigger domains than in smaller
domains. These results indicate that, if the domain size is
greater than about 3,000 acres, the relative error of the infill
BY begins to increase significantly.
From this study, we know that the size of the search area
will have a significant effect on the estimation accuracy of the
fast method. The optimum search-area size will be the first
parameter we need to determine when we apply this
technology to a new area.
We also note the non-monotonic behavior of the relative
error of infill BY with respect to search area size in Fig 6, but
we are not sure what cause that behavior. However, we do
know that the search area of 2,000 acres is very close to the
correlation length of the permeability distribution for Case 3.
Thus, it appears that the search area should be less than or
equal to the correlation length of the permeability field and the
optimal search area is the correlation length of the fields.
Geologically, the search area size should be small enough to
avoid large changes in regional reservoir properties, e.g.,
permeability. However, statistically, it needs to be large
enough to have at least several wells per window.
0
-5
Relative error, %
-10
-15
-20
-25
0.1 1 10
Search area/correlation length, dimensionless
Fig. 6 - Relative error of infill BY vs. search area/correlation
length for Case 3.
Effect of Well Spacing
The fast method will calculate the initial well spacing and
current well spacing in the data processing. The current well
spacing is used as a proxy for the drainage area. We want to
determine the effect of well spacing on the estimation results
of the moving domain technique. But the well spacings of the
100 wells in the four cases that we ran are not the same. It is
very difficult to draw any conclusions with regard to well
spacing from these 100-well cases.
To investigate the effects of non-uniform well spacing,
we ran four additional cases with the same permeability
distribution and a uniform arrangement of wells. The results
show that the well spacing does not have a significant effect
on the estimation accuracy of the fast method.
Effect of the Date for the Infill Well on the Analysis
The objective of this part of the study was to determine if the
time difference between the date for the infill wells and the
latest wells' date of first production in our study area
influences the estimation results.
Fig. 7 shows the time-production performance for a
typical domain in our study. The solid line is the best-fit line
that the fast method used to calculate infill well performance.
But, after the second round of infill drilling, the depletion rate
of the closed-boundary reservoir increased from that of the
period after the first round of infill drilling. The reservoir
depletion rate follows the dashed line after the second round
of infill drilling; it will not follow the best-fit line any more.
The ongoing infill drilling campaigns will deplete the
reservoir more rapidly than before because of the large
number of infill wells. The performance of the latest wells will
give us more valuable information on the current reservoir
than the old wells.
The difference between the two lines in Fig. 7 is not very
large at first but increases with time. This suggests that the
most accurate estimation time for the infill wells may be soon
after the latest round of infill drilling.
SPE 91755 5

Causes for Inaccurate Predictions

700 In an effort to explain why the fast method does not accurately
predict the infill-well performance for certain individual wells,
600
we closely examined the wells for which the technique
Best year, MSCM/M

500 overestimated or underestimated performance by more than

50%.
400
The primary reason for inaccurate predictions is un-
300 sampled high local variability in permeability. For example,
the fast method will underestimate the performance of an infill
200 well offsetting a low-permeability well if there is a high
100 permeability located nearby that is not sampled by a well. The
fast method is based on analysis of well locations and
0 production data; thus, if no wells are drilled in local regions of
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 high permeability, the fast method will not be able to predict
Date of first Production, year higher infill performance for the particular area. The opposite
situation also occurs, resulting in overestimates of infill
Fig. 7 - Effect of the timing of the three infill wells on the performance in certain cases.
fast method. This technology is developed primarily for tight gas
reservoirs. From the parameter sensitivity study we know that
Effect of Number of Wells the average reservoir permeability has a large influence on the
From the analyses so far we know that the fast method accuracy of the estimation. So, when we apply this technology
predictions for individual wells can be quite far off. Therefore, in high permeability reservoirs, prediction errors will increase.
ranking infill potential at specific locations may not Some of the larger errors occur in sparsely drilled regions
necessarily yield the best overall results. Poor wells, predicted of the reservoir. When the number of wells in a particular
to be good wells, may still be drilled and good wells, predicted window is inadequate, the moving domain technique defaults
to be poor wells, and may not be drilled at all. to a regional or global correlation, instead of a local
But it appears that the fast method does well in predicting correlation. A regional or global correlation obviously will not
the average infill well performance for a group of wells. So we predict local performance as accurately as a local correlation.
should examine the infill-drilling program as for groups of
wells when we use this technology to evaluate infill-drilling Field Applications
potentials. Ozona Field. The Ozona Field, is located in Crockett County
Guan et al.15 studied the effect of number of wells. The in Southwest Texas and it contains two major producing sands
results in Fig. 8 demonstrate that the variability of the (the Canyon sand and the Penn sand) with about 1,800 wells.8-
9
predicted average infill-well performance decreased with the These sands are complex turbidite deposits characterized by
number of wells in the average. lenticular gas-bearing members at depths of 6,000 to 7,500 ft
with permeability from less on 0.001 md to over 0.10 md. The
development of this field began in 1960’s on 320-acre well
160
spacing, with subsequent infill drilling on 160 and 80-acre
Case 1 spacing. Later, the 40-acre spacing was granted for the
140 Case 2 majority of the field in 1995.
Case 3 The production and geological studies of the Ozona
STDEV of error, MSCM/M

120 Case 4 Field8-9 show limited sand continuity among wells and large
various in sand qualities over short distances. Therefore, well
100 interference was not expected in the majority of the field. The
large number of existing wells and the compartmentalized
80
nature of the sands precluded detailed reservoir analysis to
60 determine the infill drilling potential in the Ozona field.
Voneiff, et al.8 first developed the fast statistical method
40 and used it to determine the infill drilling potentials in the
Ozona field. The results of their study identified 1,246 infill
20 candidates representing 636 BCF of additional reserves in the
field. Using this method, not only were they able to quantify
0
the number of infill wells and infill reserves, but they were
0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35
also able to identify the location of the infill wells in a short
1/SQRT(number of wells) time frame. Fig. 9 shows the location of the infill potential
Fig. 8 - Variability of difference between the fast method and across the Ozona field.
simulation infill potential estimates decreases as number of wells
increases. The lines are least-squares fit to the data points from
different cases.15
6 SPE 91755
Fig. 9 – Infill location map.8
Milk River. The Milk River is a shallow gas formation in the
Western Canada Sedimentary Basin and it was developed on
160-acre spacing. Hudson, et al.10 applied the fast statistical
method to determine infill potentials in a very short time. They
determined where new wells are encountering potentially
depleted reservoir and infill potentials for the Milk River
formation within a 900-well, 200,000-acre study area. After
validating this technique by history matching the production
performance of latest drilled wells, they correlated well quality
with historical well densities in order to predict the infill well
performance from 160-care spacing to 80-acre spacing. They
identified 896 infill candidates with 8.9 billion m3 of gas
reserves by using this technique.
Beside the applications in the above mentioned fields, the
fast method also has been successfully applied to Cotton
Valley in east Texas,7 Mesaverde formation in the San Juan
Basin,11 Morrow formation in Permian Basin,11 and Austin
Chalk12 to quantify infill potentials.
Discussions
It appears that the fast method performs well in predicting the
average infill well performance for a group of wells. So we
should examine the infill-drilling program as for groups of
wells when we use this technology to evaluate infill-drilling
potential. When we use this technology, we can divide a basin
or field into smaller areas and predict the distributions of infill
performance as a group for the smaller areas, rather than
individual wells.
Based on our research results we suggest using this fast
method as an infill-screening tool in the tight-gas basins
consisting of thousands of wells. In this case, it is almost
impossible to conduct conventional reservoir studies while the
moving domain technique can be used to evaluate an entire
basin in a matter of man-days. The result of this technique can
tell petroleum engineers what areas need to put more efforts in
further studies.
Based on our research on this statistical method described
in this paper we found this technology has certain limitations:
• The assumption of reservoir is homogeneous in each
moving domain is reasonable for many reservoirs. But
there are reservoirs whose properties change dramatically
within small areas. Some labyrinth-type reservoirs are
composed of narrow channel-fill bodies and major
changes in rock properties can occur between sand units
in jigsaw-puzzle reservoirs.16 We cannot put much
confidence in the estimation results from the moving
domain technology in those cases.
• When we find the performance of new wells was worse
than old wells, we do not know whether depletion or
variation in rock properties caused the drop in production
in the wells. Moreover, the changes in completion and
production technology over a long time frame could also
mask the effect of depletion.
The first-year cumulative production data17 of the
wells in Hugoton gas field show that the completion
technologies used in 1994 apparently outperform those
used in 1991. Fig. 10 shows the results in detail. The
average reservoir pressure in 1994 had decreased
approximately 20% from the value measured in 1991.
Apparently, technology changes masked the effects of
depletion in this field.
East
West
North
1st Qtr 2nd Qtr 3rd Qtr 4th Qtr
Fig. 10 - Technology improved first year cumulative
production.17
• The third limitation is that this technology requires at
least a few wells in each part of the field and that have
sufficient production history to experience boundary-
dominated flow. Only when this is true can we accurately
calculate the drainage area and recovery per acre.
However, some low-permeability reservoirs take from 9
to 14 years to reach boundary-dominated flow.8 Thus, we
may not be able to apply moving domain technology in
some gas fields with short production histories, e.g., less
than 10 years.
• This technology is based on material balance and the
pseudosteady-state flow equation for vertical wells. The
pseudosteady-state flow equation for horizontal wells is
different from vertical wells. So if horizontal wells are in
the reservoir, results from the moving domain technology
may be inaccurate.
SPE 91755
• This technology is developed mainly for single-phase
flow of gas in tight-gas reservoirs. We do not know the
accuracy of the results from this technology under
multiphase flow conditions, such as from gas reservoirs
with significant water production or from oil reservoirs.
Conclusions
In this paper we systematically evaluated the accuracy of a
fast method which can rapidly assess the infill drilling
potentials in large tight gas basins. After the parameter
sensitivity study, the strength and weakness, and field
applications of the fast method was discussed. The specific
conclusions of this study are as follows.
• For the cases examined in this work, the predicted
average infill performance was either very close to or less
than the simulated infill performance. This suggests that
the fast method tends to underestimate the infill drilling
potential, providing a conservative estimate.
• The accuracy of predicted infill well performance, for
either individual wells or the average of a group of wells,
decreases as heterogeneity increases, and increases as the
number of wells in the group increases.
• The search area used in this fast method should be either
close to or less than the reservoir permeability correlation
length.
• The estimation error of the fast method is related to the
time difference between the date for the new infill wells
and the date of the last round of infill wells. This suggests
that the most accurate estimation time for the infill wells
may be soon after the latest round of infill drilling.
• The primary advantages of the fast method are its speed
and its reliance upon only well location and production
data. It can be used to conduct infill-screening studies of
projects consisting of thousands of wells and can be used
to evaluate an entire basin in a matter of man-days.
Acknowledgement
The authors of this paper wish to thank Dr. Duane A. McVay and Dr.
Jerry L. Jensen for their guidance in this work and George Voneiff
for valuable input in this paper and MGV Energy Inc for providing
the financial support for this research.
NOMENCLATURE
A = Well spacing, acre
Avg = Average
BY = BestYear, MSCM/M
Gp = Cumulative production
km = Kilometer
MMScf/M = Million standard cubic feet per month
MSCM/M = Thousand standard cubic meter per month
STDEV = Standard deviation
VBY = Vigin best year, MSCM/M
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