Pad Drilling Vs Density Drilling

I'm in the middle of a swim meet, so I'm not concentrating as much as I should, so take everything I write this morning with "a grain of salt," as they say.

The Dickinson Press has a story on pad drilling today, something regular readers have known about for two, three, four years -- whenever Harold Hamm (CLR) introduced Eco-Pads, a copyright term, by the way, I believe.

In my mind, there is a difference between pad drilling and density drilling. Perhaps one can think of density drilling being a subset of pad drilling, though technically there would be no reason why density drilling couldn't be done on individual well sites, but that would be a real waste. So, for now, in my simple mind, density drilling is a subset of pad drilling. Another way one could say it, I suppose, is that density drilling is facilitated by pad drilling.

Be that as it may, the linked Dickinson Press article is about pad drilling and not density drilling.

Multi-well pads are becoming bigger and a more common sight in the western North Dakota Oil Patch.

The pads consolidate impacts to nearby landowners and the environment to one concentrated spot, rather than single wells being sprinkled across the landscape.

The wells’ coziness doesn’t extend underground though — horizontal drilling allows the wells to start in one spot but spawn in various directions, to wherever the oil is.

So far this year, 60 percent of the wells permitted were for shared pads, up from about a third from 2011, according to Department of Mineral Resources data.