Upsized your frack or enhanced your completion lately? If so, you’ve joined a growing technological movement in oil and gas. Enhanced completions are showing up in a variety of metrics, enough so that the process appears to have reached critical mass in oil and gas.

Several attributes describe enhanced completions. The process can incorporate an extended lateral when acreage considerations allow. Enhanced completions involve more stages per well packed more closely together with significantly greater volumes of proppant usually delivered as part of a massive slickwater treatment. Stage counts in enhanced completions are moving from the traditional 17 or 18 per 1,372-m (4,500-ft) horizontal lateral to 30 or 40—and more than 60 in some cases for extended laterals—as operators reduce spacing between stages from 76 m to 122 m (250 ft to 400 ft) down to 61 m (200 ft).

Additionally, well stimulation vendors are providing engineered perforations to increase the number of penetrations into the formation between stages.

Enhanced completions are primarily evident in the volume of proppant pumped downhole. Where operators used to pump 100,000 lb or so per stage, volumes now can rise to four or five times that level. Along with steadily rising average stage counts, Hart Energy market intelligence surveys have tracked a significant increase in average proppant per stage in recent months. In the Eagle Ford Shale, proppant use has risen from under 100,000 lb per stage among respondents in late 2013 to slightly less than 400,000 lb per stage in July 2014.

Operators use multiple varieties of sand as proppant, though upsized fracks invariably entail greater volumes of 100-mesh white sand. Volumes in fact can exceed 150 tons per stage. Adding more individual stages and multiplying those stages across four or more laterals on a single pad provides an indication of the growing intensity in downhole stimulation, which can reach upward of 11 MMlb or 12 MMlb per lateral. Furthermore, the same process is done on four or more laterals on a multiwell pad site.

Enhanced completions first came to life as a general practice in the Eagle Ford Shale in the second quarter of 2012. One operator in particular began discussing monster wells on a set of 16 horizontals with IP exhibiting a step level change to 2,500 bbl/d of oil and more than 4,500 boe/d in some of the stronger wells. State production records revealed the wells had used massive amounts of sand as proppant.

The practice has become standard in the Eagle Ford Shale and is migrating to other plays across the U.S., usually in tight oil or liquids plays, including the Bakken Shale, the Cana Woodford and the Permian Basin. In a few instances, upsized fracks—a term used interchangeably with enhanced completions—incorporate crosslinked gels instead of slickwater though still entail more sand pumped at a lower rate.

Several oil and gas operators cited rising production in second-quarter 2014 earnings calls from enhanced completions, suggesting that the practice has become widespread and confirming the significant change in downhole metrics in terms of stage count and proppant volumes that had surfaced in Hart Energy market intelligence surveys.

The theory is that finer mesh sand aggregates into pillars on flowback, keeping induced fractures open. The process not only provides larger IPs but appears to slow decline rates. As in all processes, there is some skepticism about how enhanced completions will impact ultimate recoveries. Do enhanced completions get more total recovery or simply accelerate the rate at which the same amount of hydrocarbon is extracted? Stay tuned.

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