Using Robust Models that Integrate Domain Expertise, AI, and Play-Wide Analysis, Shale Value Focuses to Provide Optimization Solutions to Industry

“Optimized completions have shown to increase well NPV by 5-30 percent and also result in lower water usage in fracking.”

Shale Value delivers industry-first truly integrated commercial and technical analyses by utilizing reservoir simulations, proprietary fluid models, and machine learning. The company’s products provide sophisticated forecasting of shale well performance and support optimization of asset values under various commodity price scenarios. The Shale Value team comprises industry experts with deep technical, AI, and commercial experience.

The company is based in Houston, Texas.

Shale Value: Synopsis   

Shale Value’s CEO, Pavana Gadde, is a technology executive who excels at driving profitable growth by launching successful industry-first products and building winning partnerships and alliances. She brings business leadership and customer focus with her innovative strategies and broad product experience. She has extensive experience spanning product management, product marketing, B2B partnerships, supply chain, and business development in fortune 100 companies. Pavana has an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and an MS in Computer Science from Texas A&M University.

Phani Gadde, the Chief Product Officer and one of the co-founders, is an energy industry executive with extensive research and advisory experience. He has forecasted paradigm shifts in the energy industry and provided strategic insights to C-Suites of Fortune 500 companies to successfully address challenges arising from structural and technology-driven changes. Phani excels at identifying key market themes and launching innovative data-driven products converging technology and strategy. Phani has an MS in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Shale Value’s technology and products are based on three foundational tenets. The first is to use cutting-edge AI. The second tenet is bringing the science back into data science. This is achieved by applying deep-domain reservoir engineering first and then blending the physics with patent-pending AI algorithms to provide accurate analysis. The third tenet is to base analysis on public domain data available for all the wells to develop play-wide analyses.

While over 20,000 shale wells have been drilled in the Permian Basin, these have been drilled across two basins and over 4-7 productive horizons and by several dozen operators with acreage positions that are rarely contiguous. Since the properties of these producing zones, as well as fracking and production methods, vary significantly, no single operator has sufficient data to undertake meaningful data analytics for optimization. Additionally, sub-surface flow behavior is highly non-linear, and a robust data analytics process requires a large dataset to capture all the variations. Shale Value overcomes the data insufficiency by linking the science to data science and training their machine learning algorithms on the outputs from engineering simulations. The company’s reliance on public data that is available for each well allows for using a significantly larger data set.

One of the key problems that the industry faces in forecasting shale production and valuing assets is that the current methods of predicting well-performance used by industry are relatively simplistic and unable to capture the complexities in shale production. These simplistic methodologies have led to unreliable forecasts and consequently led to a plethora of mixed messages on well productivity and increasing gas-oil-ratio (GOR). They also fail to quantify the upside from optimization, which can potentially lead to a 5-30 percent improvement in well economics and lower water usage in fracs.

Another critical issue that the industry is facing is a poor understanding of reservoir fluid properties. The reservoir is a rock-fluid system, and the last decade has been the decade of the frac, where operators have successfully developed fracking techniques to improve the rock parameters to produce hydrocarbons from shale reservoirs economically. Proper understanding of fluids is required to realize the next step-change in well productivity. Most operators have not developed comprehensive models to understand fluid behavior across their acreage. In most shales, fluid properties vary significantly areally across the play and the multiple productive zones. Ideally, a large number of fluid samples need to be analyzed to characterize the fluids. Yet, the industry samples only about 1-2 percent of wells drilled in the shale plays, primarily due to the high cost of fluid analysis. However, reservoir fluid properties are inputs to most engineering analyses, including well location selection, determining well spacing, designing separator conditions, drawdown management, and EOR. With sophisticated fluid models, operators can significantly increase production from wells, obtain more oil from separators, and also make better M&A decisions.

Shale Value addresses both of these pain points for clients. The company’s FACET product is an industry-first ready to use play-wide fluid analysis with greater than 90 percent accuracy. FACET provides detailed fluid analysis for every shale well by uniquely converging fluid science and data science. Shale Value’s FIRM product builds on fluid analysis by integrating analytical models and reservoir simulations to forecast well performance and objectively benchmark acreage quality and frac performance.

Shale Value’s solutions are accurate and can easily be verified by clients through blind tests. Over 15 operators, including majors, have tested the fluid model, and the results were more than 90 percent accurate compared to lab measurements or field data. The company’s analyses bridge the chasm between technical and commercial analysis, and the ready-to-use models can be easily integrated into workflows. Also contributing to Shale Value’s success is the affordability of the offered solutions. For the price of what it would typically cost to collect and analyze one fluid sample, the company provides unlimited fluid analysis for any shale well across the play in any producing horizon at any location.

Using the robust models that integrate domain expertise, AI, and play-wide analysis, Shale Value focuses to provide optimization solutions to the industry. The industry trend of increased frac intensity has led to over-design of completion in various plays. Over-designed fracs not only cost more but also have lower productivity. Optimized completions have shown to increase well NPV by 5-30 percent and also result in lower water usage in fracking.

To summarize, Shale Value’s solutions are accurate, verifiable, affordable, and can be easily integrated into engineering and analytical workflows. The company’s products bridge the chasm between commercial and engineering analysis and can help a range of stakeholders, including operators, financial institutions, midstream, and traders.

“The industry trend of increased frac intensity has led to over-design of completion in various plays. Over-designed fracs not only cost more but also have lower productivity.”