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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Fracking Choke Points in the Bakken -- North Dakota, USA

The fracking choke point in the Bakken is well known.

This press release shows how the difficulty of getting a well completed due to the fracking choke point.
Samson Oil and Gas advises that firm fracture stimulation dates for the Rodney #1-14H and Earl 1-13H wells have been established. In an earlier presentation Samson expected that the wells would be fracture stimulated in February after a service provider made a crew available, however, that crew was subsequently withdrawn.

Fracture stimulation operations are expected to commence March 14th for the Rodney well and March 28th for the Earl well. These two wells are the latest wells drilled to date in the North Stockyard field. 
Do not take this out of context. This is nothing more than a temporary delay, but it has to be very frustrating.

On another note, the press release refers to the "North Stockyard" field. To the best of my knowledge there is no "North Stockyard field." It is the "Stockyard Creek" field; at least that's the way it is still shown on the NDIC GIS map server.

This field has turned out to be a pretty good field. It is located about five (5) miles due east of Williston, in some beautiful, rolling prairie. The two wells, Earl and Rodney, could be nice wells based on previous results in Stockyard Creek. They are one mile apart from each other on the east side of this small field, smack dab in the center of field (north/south).

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The fracking bottleneck was also mentioned by EOG/CEO (Mark Papa), February 18, 2011:
On our last call, I mentioned the tightness and availability of Eagle Ford frac equipment. This continues to be a problem, although in EOG's case, we've been able to alleviate almost all bottlenecks relating to completions in frac equipment except proppants availability.

2 comments:

  1. embraceyourinnerhillbillyFebruary 16, 2011 at 7:02 PM

    stream of consciousness queries, if you can answer any of them, thank you.

    a)re: Fracking crews in the region, is there more demand than available fracking crews?
    b)Is this weather related, e.g. road closures, sub-zero temperatures, etc.?
    c)How does this delay affect other companies getting their Fracking done on schedule?

    Peter

    ReplyDelete
  2. 1. Yes, demand far outstrips supply of available fracking crews. With more rigs coming into North Dakota, the fracking issue will become more acute.

    2. This situation is exacerbated in the winter.

    3. In my original post, I answered your third question but was afraid of stepping on toes. So, I deleted two paragraphs in the original note before posting it. The bigger the company, the less problem they have with fracking delays. The larger companies have hired their own dedicated fracking crews (I have posted that on my blog several times). In addition, if a CLR-size company can offer a fracking company 20 wells every month to frack, and a small company can only offer a company like Halliburton one well to frack every two months, who do you think Halliburton is going to contract with? Finally, if push comes to shove, and there is only one fracking crew available, who do you think can pay for fracking: a CLR-size company with a multi-billion dollar market cap, or a small driller with a $150 million market cap.

    ReplyDelete

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