Jaxon Caines, technology reporter, Hart Energy: There's increased pressure on operators to improve performance. While the industry captures diagnostics, there are challenges in synthesizing the information captured to make better decisions.

So Garrett, what's the importance of simulations for the oil and gas industry?

Garrett Fowler, COO, ResFrac: Well, one of the primary challenges that we have is that we're working on rocks that are two, three miles underneath our feet and we can't see what's going on. And so we need some sort of mathematical model to describe what is happening in the subsurface and why. And that's what we can employ to make better decisions. And that's what ResFrac supplies.

JC: What makes combining reservoir and hydraulic fracturing simulations difficult?

GF: Well, the two processes are fundamentally happening on different scales. So if you think of reservoir flow through rock, you're talking inches, centimeters per day, even per year. Whereas when you're cracking rock and creating a hydraulic fracture, we are breaking rock a thousand feet away in less than an hour. And reconciling those two different timescales and length scales computationally is quite difficult. And that's the core of our technology.

JC: Here at URTeC, what is ResFrac talking about?

GF: Well, we have a variety of papers this week. One of my favorite is one that we co-authored with Chesapeake Energy, and the subject was refracs in the Eagle Ford. But the twist of it was that when we were doing the modeling, Chesapeake did not give us the results of the refrac of the two wells that were in the study. And so we built models of the primary production for the two wells, and then had to blindly predict how those refracs performed. Only afterwards did they give us the actual data, and we were spot on. So it makes a great case study, makes a great paper. And it's one that we're happy to have presented this week with Chesapeake.

JC: Well, Garrett, thank you for your time. Explore frac simulations at hartenergy.com/ep.

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