RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: New well just north of Kip "Joe"s Drilling and Completions"? Heaven Forbid!! Legacy wouldn't do that to us, would they?....
I'll agree that if well costs are at $12mm each, that is excessive and I see the completions side of that as taking the costs too high. A rig is a rig but then each drilling contractor has it's own personality and within their fleet of rigs, each rig in turn will also have a personality. If a rig is that bad, they can easily be run off for breech of contract. It all comes down to the supervisors and mainly the company rep or "consultant". They are called engineers on the rig for some reason. Normally I picture them in a pair of $75 dollar cowboy boots and a wrinkled fortrel shirt and no shine in their eyes. They generally are not motivated to reduce drilling time to completion as it would mean a loss of their pay by the day. On the other end of that spectrum could be a brilliant drilling guy with a lot of experience who answers to a drilling superintendant who might just be a brilliant engineer himself, but, everyone wants to be a drilling guy. The separation comes when the superintendant sits in his office chair (as a wanna be drilling guy) and calls shots to the brilliant drilling guy and his actions are not correct because of drilling superintendant's lack of good hands on drilling experience. There are some strange and detrimental things done in drilling on account of "fads" or some salesman's fancy pitching to someone and nowadays, the pitching is done in the home office or an idea is sold over a steak sandwich lunch at some peeler bar where the deal is done. In saying all of that however, the fact remains that actual drilling costs are not really the big part of it, generally.
These costs for LEG/BWD are from the extra consummables in drilling and excessive costs from the completions side, in my opinion. To drill and core a pilot hole was classy and prudent but now if the cores show clear samples of the geological lithography and they are stratigraphically similar between the two wells, then that piece of the drilling program can be omitted for a fairly substantial cost savings in drilling time and coring costs. Cost savings can also come from spending money on a premium drilling fluid with correct properties in terms of water loss agents for a low water loss and crisp filter cake, and correct PV/YP ratios. With this idea, I don't know of any hole problems with drilling but good drilling fluid properties while drilling in the lateral pay section can be highly beneficial to protect the production zone from any damage from invading drilling fluids but then again, whether this is an issue here or not would be the question.
This is the big thing, My Opinion. Frac Stages! Using the SH post reporting an Argosy well, they drilled a lateral section of 1150m while Spring Coulee and Kipp were drilled with 1230m and 1290m respectively. Argosy frac'd 11 stages at an average frac stage of 104.5m (343') while Spring Coulee and Kipp had 20 frac stage averages of 61.5m (202') and 64.5m (211') respectively, and a difference of approximately 130' or 40m of interval in favor of Argosy with the longer perforated interval and subsequent frac stage interval. I don't know if the perforations are *full length of the interval* nor is it known of the perferation size or number of perfs per foot, but it is all relative for all intents and purposes. The vision I have is that with a shorter interval, there could be a very real danger that the stages of fracturing in our LEG/BWD case, being closely spaced, frac's will communicate with one another and in essense we create a situation where we may have one and the same frac done in several stages. I feel that a longer frac stage is less likely to take a perceived path of least restance to the previous frac zone, but might open up fresh fractures to formation that has not felt the impact of previous frac pressures. Again, with no information at hand, these are my thoughts and I wish that I had that information. I think it would be prudent to have a sort of buffer zone on either side of the swell packers, created with non perforated, full integrity casing, to give each frac interval a chance to open up fresh rock formation at each interval. Fewer downhole tools and fewer frac stages will be a huge cost savings for the cost of tools and services alone, as well as a reduction of rig time, and may very well lead to better production rates. With no news on production rates, my thoughts are drifting towards the idea that the wells are not producing at optimum rates and I'm thinking too much for a solution.
I stand to be corrected but I thought that I read that Murphy drilled laterally out to 850m but no info on frac intervals. My understanding is that the well that was along the highway North of Cardston was on test and flowing unassisted at a decent rate. My bottom line is that I say, drill out as far laterally, as is SAFELY possible, and then do the calculations to create a frac program and get it right to be effective with the correct volume and pressures to open up that zone to allow it to flow freely, all the way to the bank! I'm bothered to hear of TORC and Murphy showing good results while our operation seems to look like a bit of a failure on the surface of it all.