The Department of Energy (DOE) announced the selection of two unconventional natural gas research and development projects for cost-shared funding. DOE will provide about $694,000 to University of Texas at Austin for R&D on a 3-D hydraulic fracture modeling project that will be tested by Anadarko Petroleum Corp. in the Carthage field in East Texas. It also will provide about $500,000 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a 4-D seismic R&D project to be demonstrated by EnCana Corp. in the Jonah Field in Wyoming.

DOE noted that unconventional natural gas could grow to 50% of the nation’s gas supply by 2030 if advanced technologies are developed and implemented. Tight gas is the largest of three so-called unconventional gas resources — the other two being coalbed methane and gas shales. The constraints on producing tight gas are due to the impermeable nature of the reservoir rocks, small reservoir compartments, abnormal (high or low) pressures, difficulty in predicting natural fractures that aid gas flow rates, and the need to predict and avoid reservoirs that produce large volumes of water.

To create fractures in the reservoir that will improve production flow, companies inject specially engineered, water-based fluids at high rates and pressures to hydraulically fracture the reservoir rock, creating pathways through which the tightly trapped gas can flow to the wellbore. Potential techniques to enhance the fracturing process and methods to better locate naturally fractured “sweet spots” in tight formations may increase domestic gas production, which helps energy security and lowers gas prices to consumers.

These two aspects of tight gas recovery technology are the focus of the two projects chosen under the DOE funding opportunity. Both projects are managed by the DOE Office of Fossil Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.

One project being conducted by the University of Texas at Austin will involve the design and implementation of new modeling that captures the impact of “energizing” fracturing jobs with the addition of carbon dioxide or nitrogen. The main goal of the project is to add thermal and compositional capabilities to 3-D hydraulic fracture models, which will allow operators to design and optimize energized frac jobs systematically. The new model will be tested by designing and implementing energized frac jobs in collaboration with Houston-based Anadarko Petroleum in the Carthage field and/or the Ozona field in West Texas. The project will cost about $1.5 million.

The other R&D project being conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is designed to develop a new method of 4-D vertical seismic profiling down wellbores in order to locate and characterize natural and induced fractures and optimize well placement. After developing the required processing and interpretation methods, university researchers will work with Denver-based EnCana Oil & Gas Inc. to demonstrate the methods in Jonah field in Wyoming. DOE will provide over half of the project’s nearly $1 million total cost.

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