Mark William McClure, David Ratcliff, Ankush Singh, Chris Ponners, Garrett Fowler

This article provides practical tips for interpreting Diagnostic Fracture Injection Tests (DFITs) using the ‘compliance method’ procedure initially developed by McClure et al. (2016) and refined in the paper URTeC-2019-123, which summarized results from a joint industry study (McClure et al., 2019). The results from McClure et al. (2016) demonstrated that common practices for stress estimation often underestimate the true magnitude of the minimum principal stress, a finding that has been subsequently been confirmed by direct in-situ measurements and laboratory experiments (Dutler et al., 2020; Bröker and Ma, 2022; Guglielmi et al., 2023; Ye and Ghassemi et al., 2023), as well as in the field measurements reviewed by McClure et al. (2016). URTeC-2019-123 provides a step-by-step process for estimating stress, permeability, and pore pressure. It also discusses how to handle topics such as near-wellbore tortuosity and deviation from Carter leakoff. However, the paper primarily focuses on interpreting ‘ideal’ data – tests that conform to the behavior seen in ‘typical’ DFIT numerical simulations. McClure et al. (2022) performed a statistical review of 62 field DFITs from around North America and observed significant deviation from ideality in many of the tests. For example, an “S” shaped dP/dG curve, which is used for estimating stress, is not seen in a significant percentage of DFITs. For practical purposes, we need guidelines for interpreting DFITs when ideal conditions are not met. This document provides recommendations based on the authors’ experience analyzing a large number of DFITs across North and South America. Also, this document provides a somewhat more streamlined and unambiguous set of recommendations, compared with the original reference, McClure et al. (2019).