Characteristic Production Decline Patterns for Shale Gas Wells in Barnett

Abstract

This paper derives characteristic decline patterns for shale gas wells by analyzing historical well production data using decline curve analysis of 14,453 shale gas wells in the Barnett shale play from 2000 to 2014. The Hyperbolic model and the Stretched Exponential model are applied on the well-by-well production data at average aggregate well and individual well levels to derive the characteristic parameters. Both the Hyperbolic curve and the Stretched Exponential curve display a good fit to the data for both the average aggregate and the individual shale gas wells. The Hyperbolic model performs slightly better than the Stretched Exponential model in this study. The first year rate of decline for production of a shale gas well is around 60% and over the first two years is around 73%. There is an increasing trend in initial production for new wells over the last decade. A supposed cutoff production rate of 133 Mcf/d results in the estimated ultimate recoverable resource (URR) of about 1.4-2.7 billion cubic feet and a well life time of 11-29 years, which is in line with other studies.