Well Density in the Bakken; Horizontal Patterns in the Bakken; QEP Looking At Interference

Wall Street Cheat Sheet is reporting, excerpts from QEP earnings call, on cost:

Howard Weil: Couple questions on the Bakken, Chuck I think you talked about getting to $11 million or potentially below. Can you talk about where you are seeing the cost trends and kind of what’s the major effect and how low I mean can you get $10 million or where do you see the cost side going?  

Charles B. Stanley – President and CEO: When you said 10 million, Jim Torgerson started nodding his head. So, I’m going to say nine or less. Thank you for that, I’ll send you a gift card in the mail. So, I think several key avenues to driving down completed well cost.

On well density:

 I would tell you that we have de facto done that to the East on the reservation where we have drilled some fan-shaped pads because of the configuration of the pads in the lake bottom. So, we have drilled wells that are at the toe are well more than 80 acre spacing. But at the heel, the closest portion before the vertical part of the well, they are very close together because they all M&A from the same pad and have drilled out in a radio pattern from that pad. We are looking at the performance of those wells to see if we can see signs of interference. Obviously, it’s very difficult to determine exactly where in the wellbore we’re seeing interference or if we’re interference at all, but that is an example where we have drilled on closer density. From our original modeling of the acquisition on South Antelope and our analysis of oil in place versus recoverable oil, we think that the right well spacing as four wells per reservoir per 1,280 acre spacing, but obviously we remain open minded about increased density beyond that.