Development Status and Future Trends of Intelligent Fracturing Technologies

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology and its wide implementation in the oil and gas industry, impressive progress in intelligent fracturing technologies has been achieved. These are technologies that involve the intelligent optimization of fracture and fracturing parameters, fluids and materials, equipment and tools, early warning system for fracturing risks, control of real-time fracturing parameter optimization, and fracture monitoring, etc. Despite that, a complete intelligent fracturing technology system remains to be developed due to unbalanced developed degree among those aspects.After the development status of intelligent fracturing technologies was analyzed, the development trends of intelligent fracturing were identified, including in-depth data mining of small data samples, building an intelligent decision-making platform for geological-engineering integrated fracturing based on 3D sweet spot distribution, developing intelligent responsive fracturing fluids and materials, creating a 4D intelligent monitoring model for fracture propagation and achieving visualization, and building unattended fracturing equipment and intelligent tools. All of these are crucial for developing a complete and uniform intelligent fracturing technology system and accomplishing another round of hydraulic fracturing technology innovations.