Philip Nguyen and Jim Trela and Billy R. Smith, Halliburton
The use of curable resin pre-coated proppants was often applied in the Permian Basin area to control proppant flowback. However, these pre-coated proppant materials continued to allow propopant to produce back, especially during production surges because they did not provide sufficient consolidation strength to handle high drawdown. Since early 2005, a low-temperature curable liquid resin system was selected to treat the proppant on-the-fly mainly during the tail-in stages in most of 1,500 hydraulic fracturing treatments. This paper highlights how the proppant back-production problems were successfully overcome through the application of this curable resin system. Detailed descriptions of the treatments, challenges, and lessons learned during the course of these fracturing treatments are presented.