In January 2026 we will welcome DL Mateus Palharini Schwalbert, who will present "Improving Well Performance in Carbonate Reservoirs with Appropriate Stimulation" to kickoff our 2026 Speaker Season.

The key take-away from this lecture is what are the stimulation goals carbonate scenarios, and how to best achieve these goals by a rational stimulation design.

Biography

Mateus is a senior researcher on well stimulation and completions in Petrobras Research, Development, and Innovation Center in Brazil. He is the technical leader for stimulation in the company vision for the future and works on multi-disciplinary RD&I projects in different areas, such as stimulation, completions, reservoir, and production. His main areas of expertise are mathematical modeling and simulation of stimulation operations, well-reservoir flow coupling, well productivity, and decision making for stimulation technique and well architecture. He also works on software development to simulate well performance, stimulation operations, and well architectures, and supports well operations and design.

Abstract

This lecture presents a summary of how to improve well performance in conventional carbonate reservoirs through well stimulation. It starts with a brief overview of carbonate reservoirs characteristics. Then the two main goals of well stimulation are presented: (1) increasing the well productivity or injectivity index, and (2) obtaining an evenly distributed stimulation along the wellbore. Some example economic gains of achieving each of these goals are presented, followed by a discussion of the candidate scenarios where each goal is more important. It is shown how improving the productivity index is paramount in low permeability reservoirs, but obtaining an evenly distributed stimulation is more important in high permeability and highly heterogeneous carbonate reservoirs. Then a rationale of how to obtain the best stimulation for each scenario is presented, composed of: (1) selecting the most appropriate stimulation technique for each scenario by comparing the reservoir and operational factors that affect the outcome of matrix acidizing, acid fracturing, and proppant fracturing, and (2) designing the best possible stimulation job and completions using resources for simulating both stimulation operations and completions and the reservoir flow.