Project Nebraska
From ESER oil and gas
Contents |
What is "Project Nebraska"?
- Project Nebraska is Eser Corporation's '09-'10 640-acre (gross) exploratory drilling project in the Nebraska Niobrara Chalk
- Project Nebraska consists of:
- top-grading acreage aquisition candidates using ESER 3D GIS
- controlling the target acreage
- permitting for 3D seismic aquisition
- shooting a 3D seismic survey
- processing the seismic data
- interpreting the seismic data
- selecting drilling sites
- permitting wells
- drilling, logging, and completing the wells
- designing frac jobs
- fracture stimulating the wells
- designing and building water-gathering and gas-gathering systems
- finding a market
- testing the wells
- hooking the wells up to production
- installing deliquification beam-pumps to lift water off of the Niobrara Chalk formation
- operating the lease
- downspacing to 20-acre spacing
- evaluating the potential for deeper pay in the D-sand (gas), J-sand (gas), and Lansing Kansas-City (oil) formations
Where is Eser Corporation's Nebraska Niobrara Chalk drilling project located?
- High-resolution map of surrounding acreage and offsetting Natural Gas wells -- both producing and permitted:
- Locations of offsetting Natural Gas pipelines, wells, and seismic lines:
- Plat Map of Eser Corporation's lease in Chase County, Nebraska:
Overview of the Nebraska Niobrara Chalk
- The shallow, Upper Cretaceous Niobrara chalks contains biogenic gas and produces from fractures.
- The Niobrara Chalk is a reservoir rock, but is also its own source rock.
- The Niobrara Chalk formation is comprised of fault-bounded compartments.
- The process that created the structural traps for gas is salt-solution.
- Amplitude, frequency, and phase attributes from 3D seismic enable identification of gas-charge on faulted features.
- 3D seismic can be used to show areas and volumes for a gas-drainage model and yield-prediction.
- Salt-solution before and after Niobrara deposition created a mappable event that corresponds to current gas-saturation in Niobrara chalks.
- The gas-productive interval can be broadly characterized as exhibiting high porosity (PHI=28-44%) and moderate permeability (k=0.01-5 md).
- Analysis of pre- and post-fracture well performance indicates that fractures play a role in gas production.
- However, production from many wells can be explained by the presence of a single horizontal parting within the 30-50 ft productive interval.
- Because of the low permeability of the reservoir rocks, natural fracturing is an important reservoir component related to economical production.
Eser Corporation's use of 3D Seismic for Development of the Nebraska Niobrara Chalk
- Natural fractures significantly enhance the relative permeability to gas. Permeability enhancement through hydraulic fracturing is greatest when the hydraulic fracture stimulation connects the natural fracture network to the well bore.
- The "sweet spot" is an area of natural fractures. Areas of high connectivity and high storage capacity are the better reservoir.
- An exploration strategy in this setting is to find the faults using multicomponent seismology and then high-grade the better reservoir components through a combination of Vp/Vs measurements and shear wave azimuthal anisotropy.
- A development strategy is to identify these sweet spots early and connect wells through hydraulic fracturing to the natural fracture systems.
- Predicting natural fracture swarms and high production sweet spots is critical.