high impact drilling, page-7

Hope this excerpt helps :

From the Motleyfool interview :

Motleyfool : From my research 12,000 wells have already been drilled in Boling Dome and 40 million barrels of oil equivalent have been produced. That's around 3,300 barrels per well. Is it still economical to extract oil? What flow rates and life of wells do you expect? Can you get more than 3,300 barrels per well? Also, Texas State Historical Association says Boling Dome encompasses 5,500 acres. You have 7,500 gross acres and 4,500 net and are looking to expand acreage. Different boundaries? 

Henrich and Simmons: The number of wells is incorrect, as most of the wells generally referred to on Boling Dome are sulphur mining tests and sulphur producers and not related to oil and gas. There are less than 2,000 known true oil producers we have identified on Boling Dome. We have spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars building libraries and databases on every known oil & gas producer in the field. This data came from the original owners and operators in the field since the 1920's. Of special interests here -- a great number of the many thousands of sulphur mining wells encountered oil shows which were not their objective and bypassed.  

Field boundaries on salt domes are a moving target subject to whether outer bands of oil and gas (both deep and shallow) may exist. We believe the potential for undiscovered outer bands of production exists on all three of our fields. 

Motleyfool : Is the acreage not on the domes as productive? 

Henrich and Simmons: We will not know until we drill it. We have very encouraging indicators from the reprocessing of old seismic lines we have acquired in Blue Ridge as well as old drilling data from tests drilled in the 1920's indicating oil shows.  

Let's address salt dome field sizes and acreage for the benefit of your readers. They have never been exposed to the significant reserves that can exist with small land areas such as those in the Gulf Coast salt domes. There are many examples should your readers want to research this topic. Here are a few examples: 

? Hastings field, a deep seated sale dome approximately 12 miles from Blue Ridge, encompasses approximately 4,500 acres. Around 600 wells in that field, discovered in 1934, have thus far produced over 600 million barrels. It was producing around 1,500 BOPD a few years ago.
? Spindletop Dome, one of the original salt domes east of our fields, has produced over 150 million barrels from only the 500 acre centre of the field. It is still producing.  
? Salt Dome overhangs are along the edges and beneath existing salt dome in many instances. When these features are found to be productive, the production rates and reserves can be exceptional. On two of Maverick's salt domes these features are confirmed to exist and have yet to be tested or exploited. That process begins in the fall (Sept - Nov) of this year and will be an exciting time for our company.  

Maverick's holdings are a blend of solid oil reserves in place (“rabbits”), step out oil bands we have identified which requires further drilling to confirm (“kangaroos”), and significant prospective reservoirs never drilled yet with massive upside impacts (“elephants”). Our job is blending these into a diversified plan which makes economic sense. We may have just developed a new oil field term, kangaroo! After all a kangaroo is somewhere between a rabbit and an elephant.