New drilling technologies boost returns on wells
Here's Jim Fuquay's Sunday story on new drilling technologies. This is the top of the story:
Spend a few million bucks putting together a lease, drilling a well and coaxing it to give up some of the natural gas locked up in the Barnett Shale, and what do you get? Maybe 20 percent to 30 percent of the gas that’s there.
Not good enough, producers say. They’re developing new techniques and technologies to boost that to 50 percent or more, and if they succeed, it could be the answer to what one petroleum engineer calls "the $100 billion question."
Horizontal drilling — turning a steel drill pipe 90 degrees from vertical to horizontal — is what made the shale happen. But that’s yesterday’s news.
Today, producers are making horizontal runs, called laterals, up to twice the industry’s more typical 3,000 feet. They are also making more fractures along those laterals and fracturing two adjacent wells at the same time in an effort to crack the hard shale like a windshield after a North Texas hailstorm. They are squeezing in an extra well bore between two existing wells, boosting recovery while using the existing drilling site, an increasingly scarce commodity as drilling moves into urban areas.
-- Scott
(Photo: archive at drill site in Weatherford)
