Download or read book A Study of Decline Curve Analysis in the Elm Coulee Field written by Seth C Harris and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last two years, due in part to the collapse of natural gas prices, the oil industry has turned its focus from shale gas exploration to shale oil/tight oil. Some of the important plays under development include the Bakken, Eagle Ford, and Niobrara. New decline curve methods have been developed to replace the standard Arps model for use in shale gas wells, but much less study has been done to verify the accuracy of these methods in shale oil wells. The examples that I investigated were Arps with a 5% minimum decline rate as well as the stretched exponential model (SEPD) and the Duong method. There is a great amount of uncertainty about how to calculate reserves in shale reservoirs with long multi-fractured horizontals, since these wells have not yet been produced to abandonment. Although the Arps model can reliably describe conventional reservoir production decline, it is still uncertain which empirical decline curve method best describes a shale oil well to get a rapid assessment of expected recovery. My focus began in the oil window of the Eagle Ford, but I ultimately chose to study the Elm Coulee field (Bakken formation) instead to see what lessons an older tight oil play could lend to newer plays such as the Eagle Ford. Contrary to existing literature, I have found evidence from diagnostic plots that many horizontal wells in the Elm Coulee that began producing in 2006 and 2007 have entered boundary-dominated flow. In order to accommodate boundary flow I have modified the Duong and SEPD methods such that once boundary-dominated flow begins the decline is described by an Arps curve with a b-value of 0.3. What I found from hindcasting was that early production history, up to six months, is generally detrimental to accurate forecasting in the Elm Coulee. This was particularly true for the Arps with 5% minimum decline or the Duong method. Early production history often contains apparent bilinear flow or no discernible trend. There are many possible reasons for this, particularly the rapid decrease in bottomhole pressure and production of fracture fluid. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/151644