The most important piece of news is operations are running smoothly and proceeding as expected.
Oil and gas shows while drilling in a formation that is known to contain oil and gas, whilst encouraging to does not " prove" the well as such. As mentioned before, the well needs to be perforated and fracked before we know how successful it has been.
There are still roughly 4100 feet of feet left to drill along the formation . What we need is for there to be lots of natural fractures present in the formation along the length of the horizontal section, similar and hopefully more than what was shown in the photos of the Hunsucker 11-1 well.
The more fractures there are, along with the porosity porosity and permeability of the rock will be key to how the well produces.
Natural fractures in the reservoir rock are very important as they are significant conduits to allow the oil and gas trapped in the surrounding rock to flow through the perforations into the well bore. The more porous rock, ( size of spaces in a sponge) the more contained volume of oil and gas is in the rock, the more permeable the rock, ( interconnections between the space in the sponge) the better the ability for the oil and gas to move through the rock. The more natural fractures in the rock, the more ( highways) for the oil and gas to travel along to the well.
Fracture stimulation as such does create many new fractures, but opens up the existing fractures via the pressure of the water pumped under high pressure , and these fractures are kept open by the sand particles that are carried in the water. Fracking is like widening a highway to allow more cars to drive down the road after leaving home , driving down side streets and arterial road to the highway. The more houses with cars parked ( Porosity), the more local and arterial roads ( permeability) the better that traffic can drive to the highways ( fractures) and when you add lanes to the highways to get more traffic moving faster ( fracking) you move many more cars faster .
So today's result shows there are cars parked , looks like lots of cars , and they know that there will be moving traffic on the roads because in the surrounding towns, the roads etc look the same . But it wont be until the highway is widened ( fracking and production test ) that they will know how much and how well the traffic well flow ( hopefully over the estimated 1300BOPED)
What is instructive is the comment " analogous to what has been reported in offsetting wells" as some of these offsetting wells are the ones where the IP24 rates have come in at 1500 BOEPD and more. A lot of the team drilling this well were the same guys that drilled the Flash well, with the Latshaw drilling manager for that well working his stuff on the Jewell. The fact that results are coming in along a similar trajectory is certainly encouraging, for all stake holders.
July, August can't come around fast enough but so far , so good.
cheers
Dan
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