Utah FORGE is excited to announce the successful completion of the three-stage hydraulic stimulation of its first highly deviated injection well, 16A(78)-32.

Well 16A(78)-32 drilling was completed in January 2021. This is an inclined well (65°to the vertical) that will be the injection arm of the doublet that forms the heart of the Utah FORGE experimental configuration.

Subsequently, two additional monitoring wells – vertical – were drilled so that they, along with existing well 58-32, could serve as monitoring wells for future work at the FORGE site. In particular, wells 58-32, 78B-32 and 56-32 had been instrumented with fiber optics and geophones to triangulate on microseismic events during the recent fracturing in Well 16A(78)-32. These microseismic clouds define the morphology of three hydraulic fractures created at the toe (extremity) of Well 16A(78)-32.

A chronology of the events for the recent three-stage hydraulic fracturing is as follows:

• Fourteen frac tanks were sited on the location and filled with Milford City culinary water. Each tank holds 500 bbl (21,000 gallons per tank) of water.
• Frontier Drilling Rig 28 was trucked to the location, assembled, and brought into service.
• A preliminary run of drill pipe was made into the hole. This drill string had a bit with a casing scraper and a drift sub. The bit was run to near the end of the open-hole section of the wellbore while the casing scraper was positioned to stay within the cased-hole and ensured the absence of debris. The drift sub was run one joint above the casing scraper and guaranteed that there was adequate clearance to run additional tools (in particular, bridge plugs).
• Extreme Wireline next ran a perforating gun on the end of drill pipe into the openhole section (below 10,787 ft MD). In addition to the perforating gun, a mechanical casing collar locator was run and confirmed the casing tally so that the depth of the gun was more accurately known. This 3-1/8” diameter gun was 2 ft long with 6 shots per foot at 60° phasing. MTS Solutions pumped down the drill pipe to seat a dropped ball and fire the guns. The successful firing served as a check shot for orienting geophones in the three offset wells.
• MTS Solutions next pumped a Shear Stimulation Test for one hour at an average rate of 0.36 bpm followed by shutdown and monitoring the pressure decline for an hour. A total of 52 bbl of water was pumped for this test.

Following the recovery of the bridge plugs from the well, on April 23, 2022 the rig started rig-down operations and laying down drill pipe.