Integrated fracturing, microseismic technology released for heightened stimulation control

Courtesy BJ Services

BJ Services and Baker Hughes have launched their IntelliFrac service, a technology offering that integrates BJ’s fracturing and production enhancement services with advanced microseismic services from Baker Hughes. The combined offering will enable operators to monitor fracture dimensions during stimulation treatments while also controlling fracture operations in real time.

Together, BJ and Baker Hughes blend more than 28 years of shale gas fracturing experience and a dedicated shale fracturing technology team with microseismic inversion and 3D modeling capabilities.

During hydraulic fracturing operations, the IntelliFrac service monitors and measures the microseismic events that indicate key fracture properties, including azimuth, height, length, volume, and complexity of the induced fractures. By understanding hydraulic fracture propagation, operators can make better on-location treatment management decisions, and in turn reduce well completion and stimulation risk and uncertainty. Once the microseismic data set has been gathered and processed, operators can use the data to optimize field development plans and potentially reduce the number of wellbores required to develop the field.

“The IntelliFrac service gives both BJ Services’ and Baker Hughes’ customers a seamless fracturing and microseismic offering,” said Jeff Hibbeler, BJ Services vice president, technology and logistics. “Being able to look downhole and change the fracturing process on-the-fly is especially critical in areas with complex fracturing, such as shales, where BJ has successfully designed and pumped more than 17,000 oil and gas shale frac stages around the world.”

James McDougall, Baker Hughes vice president, Baker Atlas marketing, noted, “With IntelliFrac services our clients can maximize well and field performance using Baker Hughes’ formation evaluation and cased-hole wireline expertise with BJ Services’ world-class pumping and stimulation services. Fracturing services can be a significant percentage of total well completion costs, so getting an optimal stimulation treatment is critical. The combination of superior technologies, seismic experts, and experience provides our customers with the knowledge they need to appropriately invest their stimulation program spend.”

Baker Hughes and BJ Services have been collaborating on the IntelliFrac service for several months prior to the announcement of their merger agreement.
More information on BJ Services’ fracturing technologies, including its “Understand the Reservoir First” concept that uses petrophysical reservoir characterization and map-based methods to study reservoir quality; well architecture; and drilling, completion, stimulation, and production results, can be found at www.bjservices.com.

More information on Baker Hughes’ suite of formation evaluation technologies, including its Shale Gas Evaluation Suite to characterize complex shale gas reservoirs to increase production, can be found at www.bakerhughes.com .