Predicting Productivity in the Eagle Ford through the Integration of Seismic, Geologic and Engineering Attributes

The Eagle Ford Shale in Texas is one of the more exciting unconventional resource plays in the United States at the current time due to its size and production numbers. The key issues for the exploration companies are finding where to focus acreage acquisition and how to improve drilling plans for optimal gas and oil recovery. This can be accomplished by applying the workflow demonstrated here. Seismic data provides information about stress and fractures from azimuthal anisotropy, rock strength predictions from elastic inversion, and fault/flexure analysis from volumetric curvature. Next, an integration of geologic and engineering data with the geophysical data allows for an analysis that establishes the most important data types, in terms of production, by comparing relationships between well performance metrics and these data. Once a portfolio of performance indicators has been established, they can be brought together in multivariate space to produce a predictive model of well prospectivity and performance.