Stand-Ups vs Lay-Ups; Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due -- The Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Elsewhere I'm glad to see they are finding stuff on this blog they find useful to post and/or link. Don was the one who originally alerted me to the link: outstanding presentation.

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 Updates

February 21, 2017: amazing how far we have come!

Original Post

They are also talking about Whiting's unimpressive Arthaud well in Gaylord oil field. The writers are talking about stand-up and lay-down wells. For newbies, this has to do with the orientation of the horizontal laterals. Stand-ups run, generally, north-south; whereas, laydowns generally run east-west. These are the two wells being compared:

• 18833, 1,832, Whiting, Froehlich 44-9TFH, Bell, s5/10;t9/10; cumulative 108,767 bbls, laydown; 28 stages, 3.2 million pounds sand
• 19809, 222, Whiting, Arthaud 21-29TFH, Gaylord s3/11; t5/11; cum 11,128 bbls, stand-up; 30 stages; 2 million lbs sand

As noted, folks are discussing the orientation of the wells.

Here are five other stand-up wells in Gaylord:

• 19820 (directly north of Arthaud),843, Whiting, Dietz 21-17TFH, Gaylord
• 19816 (directly east of Arthaud), 202, Whiting, Paluck 21-28TFH, Gaylord
• 19937, 404, Whiting, Paluck 21-27TFH, Zenith
• 19926, 161, Whiting, Roller 21-26TFH, Zenith
• 19923, 865, Whiting, Richard 21-15TFH, Zenith

Unfortunately, except for the Froelich, I cannot find any other laydown horizontals to compare.

If the folks are unto something, that the laydowns are better than the stand-ups, this is very, very problematic. All of the spacing units are 1280-acres in this area, and they are all oriented for stand-ups (sections stacked vertically), except for two spacing units, including the one the Froehlich happened to be in. There is currently a second Froehlich being drilled -- in the same spacing unit as the first Froehlich and almost the same orientation:

• 21291, DRL, Whiting, Froehlich 41-9TFH, Bell.

I recently saw a request for a permit for "overlapping 1280" which I did not know what that meant, but I now have an idea what is meant by an "overlapping 1280." If it turns out that there is something to this (laydowns vs stand-ups) we may see some horizontals crossing adjacent 1280-spacing units.

It will be important to sort this out: if folks recall, acreage in the Bell area was acquired for an enormous sum of money/acre.