Leading Montney operators are using a mix of completion technologies including sliding sleeve, ball & seat and plug & perf systems to maximize production and efficiency.

Plug & perf completions are the leading technology of choice with ball & seat completions in a firm second place, said Rhonda Gravel, senior engineering advisor, drilling and completions, at geoLOGIC systems ltd. Sliding sleeve technology has been used in less than 10 per cent of Montney completions to date.

Gravel compared two parallel well pads brought onstream in the Parkland area (81-17W6). She examined the completions design and productivity of industry-leading plug & perf and less common sliding sleeve technologies.

Click here for free data on the frac design of these Montney pads — including fluid and proppant totals, rates and breakdown and closure pressures, production and logs.

Gravel said the north pad consists of six wells completed in the Upper and Middle Montney using plug & perf technology. The south pad consists of five wells drilled in the Upper Montney using sliding sleeve technology. The wells on both pads had similar completed lateral lengths and proppant per metre completed.

“The big difference in completion design was in the number of stages and the amount of proppant delivered per stage,” she said. “The sliding sleeve wells averaged 96 individual stages, whereas the plug & perf completions averaged 24 frac stages per well but utilized 150-200 perf clusters over the entire well. The sliding sleeve wells used 50 tonnes per stage, whereas the plug & perf wells averaged 190 tonnes of proppant per stage — or ~25 tonnes per cluster.”

The wells analyzed were brought onstream within the same year — between April 2021 and January 2022. At the six-month production mark, the three top performing wells of this group all utilized plug & perf technology.

“With dramatically different fracturing job designs, there is much to consider in terms of the reasons for production performance. In a healthy pricing market, operators will continue to experiment with completions design,” said Gravel.

Click here for data on the Montney well pads analyzed within this article. Explore the frac design with fluid and proppant totals, rates and breakdown and closure pressures, as well as production and logs. This visualized data is instantly available free of charge to guest users of geoLOGIC’s gDC Cloud.