Performance Redefined: A Business-Centric Approach to Assessing Hydraulic Fracturing Execution

Abstract

The hydraulic fracturing of an unconventional well is typically the single most significant component of the expenditure for that well; however, there is no industry standard for assessing the efficiency of that operation. This work will present an approach for evaluating hydraulic fracturing performance that transcends commonly used key performance indicators (KPIs). Historically, the industry has focused on various metrics, such as pumping hours per day, to quantify a frac crew's efficiency. However, many commonly used KPIs may provide incomplete and sometimes misleading indicators of the actual performance of a given completions spread. This paper will present examples of traditionally used KPIs, instances where they have gone wrong, and offer an alternative means of consolidating and visualizing data from various commonly available sources. The intent is to better diagnose drivers affecting the performance of a given hydraulic fracturing spread. Commonly collected data from a hydraulic fracturing job, including rates, volumes, design parameters, and job logs, are transformed into consistent and easily understandable metrics. These data have been collected for hundreds of jobs and stages over the last few years and integrated into a dashboard to get a high-level understanding of performance. The authors of this paper have mined these data sets for examples to share lessons learned from experience and present some of the critical factors that can substantially impact performance. A review of historically used KPIs (stages, hours, feet per day, transition times, etc.) will reveal that none are ideal, and many suffer significant flaws. For example, a typical ‘stage’ design can vary wildly between areas. Pumping hours per day do not account for actual output during those hours. Case studies will illustrate the potential pitfalls of traditional KPI tracking and introduce the value of a more comprehensive approach. The methodology presented will divide the efficiency of a frac crew into a few broad buckets. The first encompasses surface efficiency - how physical operations on the well site affect the ability to pump. The second is hydraulic efficiency - quantifying how effectively the spread can attain and maintain the target pumping rate. The final bucket focuses on capturing overall crew performance in a single metric – slurry volume pumped. The volume pumped per day captures daily performance, while cumulative volume pumped over time reveals macro efficiency trends. Hydraulic fracturing KPIs have not been standardized. Additionally, they are often only evaluated and reviewed monthly or quarterly, not daily. Subsurface drivers of efficiency are also commonly neglected. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first work to present a methodology for holistically assessing a hydraulic fracturing operation's effectiveness and efficiency using a combination of surface and subsurface metrics trackable on a daily basis.