The Wattenberg Story – Birth of Massive Hydraulic Fracturing

Abstract This is a bit of a history lesson, fully describing the development of the Wattenberg field. The successful development of this field with massive hydraulic fracturing led to the opening of the DJ Basin as an important oil/gas producing province. Following the Wattenberg success the basin eventually reached a total gas production of 500 MMscf/day. Wattenberg itself became the 7th largest gas field in N. America producing 194 BCF/year in 2003. The field was discovered by Amoco Production Co, in 1970 with the drilling of seven exploration and delineation wells. The wells were fractured with typical treatments for that time (20 to 40,000 lbs of 20/40 mesh white sand using a linear gel). The wells responded very well, and after only a short flow period were shut-in as land was leased and production facilities prepared. When the wells were reopened to flow, the surprising result was a rapid production decline with liquid loading killing the wells within a few months. It was the industry's first introduction to the transient flow phenomena of fractured wells in very low permeability formations (on the order of 0.005 mD in this case). Larger treatments were attempted with very beneficial results, these were reported in the only paper discussing this field. What the paper did not report was that 2 out of 3 of these larger treatments failed due to early total screen-outs. This led to a series of "spectacular failures" (to borrow a term coined by Martin Rylance in a recent Wed(NSI)day presentation) as different procedures were trialed (higher rate, higher viscosity, more pad, fluid loss additives, …) – all leading to worse results. Basically, operations went from the successful placement of 300,000 lbs of sand to an inability to place even 100,000 lbs ! This paper will review this history and describe how understanding the subsurface geomechanics led to radical changes in treatment design ultimately opening the DJ Basin to production.