In the last decade, our understanding of shale reservoirs has progressed significantly. It is now agreed that a major factor for the productivity of shale reservoirs is the existence of a pervasive reservoir fracture network around the well. Accordingly, a common practice is to use hydraulically fractured horizontal wells to improve the connection with the reservoir fractures. Flow in these unconventional systems is considered linear in the fractured volume around the well and is usually interpreted with conventional reservoir engineering wisdom. The flaw in this interpretation is an accurate accounting of the matrix contribution due to the unconventional nature of flow in nano-darcy shale matrix.

Dr. Erdal Ozkan is a professor of Petroleum Engineering and co-director of Marathon Center of Excel-lence for Reservoir Studies at Colorado School of Mines. Previously, he was on the faculty at Istanbul Technical University. He has BS and MS degrees from Istanbul Technical University and a Ph.D. de-gree from the University of Tulsa, all in Petroleum Engineering. His research interests are horizontal well technology, pressure-transient analysis, modeling fluid flow in porous media, and shale reservoirs.