Integrated Well Construction Approach for Exploratory Shale Gas Horizontals

Horizontal wells with multi-stage fracturing are typically drilled in shale gas plays for them to become economically feasible to produce gas. Drilling long laterals in shale ushers wellbore stability challenges especially in build section due to hole packoff, tight hole, stuck pipe or lost circulation. These challenges result in considerable amount of nonproductive time (NPT) which needs to be minimized or effectively controlled for the play to be economically exploitable. In this paper, the authors present a multi-disciplinary integrated workflow to optimize well construction. Practical use and verification of this workflow was demonstrated by field examples where well-construction time was optimized by more than 50% on the first batch of horizontal wells drilled.