Silixa Limited has launched Carina XwellXpress hydraulic fracture monitoring service

THE WOODLANDS, Texas -- Silixa Ltd announces the launch of Carina XwellXpress, the crosswell low frequency strain and microseismic monitoring service that accurately locates microseismic and strain events in real-time through wireline interventions, allowing operators to improve stimulation and completion designs to maximize recovery.

This revolutionary service is set to transform the unconventional oil and gas market by removing the most challenging barriers that keep operators from implementing diagnostic services: high costs, lack of real-time data and interference with operations. Changes in frac design can dramatically alter the ultimate recovery with a variance of 30% or higher. Silixa’s fiber optic sensing-based Carina XwellXpress service removes uncertainty and maximizes return on investment by optimizing frac designs on the fly.

Carina XwellXpress capitalises on the breakthrough performance of the Carina Sensing System, the engineered fibre optic sensing solution, that has 100x improvement in signal-to-noise ratio, and greater than 100x improvement in the lower frequency ranges of slow strain and microseismic compared to other DAS systems. Due to its unparalleled sensitivity it can detect changes in low frequency strain induced by the development of the fracture network while simultaneously detecting microseismic events and crosswell frac hits.

The measurement of crosswell strain and specifically the poroelastic effect of rock movement or strain has not been measured to date with a wireline intervention cable. For the first time in history with an intervention cable, the system allows for the monitoring of the entire wellbore in real-time enabling the visualization of effects modeled and understood but not measured up to now.

Carina XwellXpress offers unmatched system flexibility with uncompromised data quality delivered in real-time. It is a distributed acoustic sensing system that captures acoustic energy every meter along an intervention wireline cable equipped with Constellation fibre. The intervention cable can be deployed into any well not being treated at the time, turning it into an observation well. Wells can be chosen during the hydraulic fracking operation to map crosswell strain, locate microseismic events, and collect key seismic data leading to a better understanding of completion design effectiveness and the actual fracture geometry.

The use of wireline does not compromise data quality; data can be acquired along the entire length of the intervention cable, unlike the limited aperture of a geophone array.

Glynn Williams, Silixa’s CEO, said: “We are proud to launch our Carina XwellXpress service that is expected to revolutionize shale development. Until now, hydraulic fracturing operations had to rely heavily on modeled data due to the lack of technology capable of delivering the required measurements. Now, given the Carina Sensing System’s superior sensitivity, operators are empowered to make confident decisions “on the fly” based on facts and measured data. Our new service enables operators to observe fracture development in real-time, permitting dynamic change of treatment parameters. This translates to immediate optimization of operations giving maximum recovery. “