lautrec, I'm sorry, but I have to pull you up on your analogy,...

lautrec,

I'm sorry, but I have to pull you up on your analogy, it seems a little bit of a furfy. The formation maybe fractured, it maybe not. The point is, either the formation is poor quality (has low permeability) or they damaged the well, or most likely both.

Now for my analogy. Imagine a car on a road in the middle of suburbia. In a quality (low permeability) reservoir, the streets are narrow and tortuous and there's many other cars (gas molecules) on the roads. As they migrate towards the well, the number of streets become fewer and the cars compete to get to the well, heavy traffic ensues. However, when you frac, it's like building a super highway (high permeability sand) which allows the cars (gas molecules) to break out of the rat race and head towards the well at 100mph (in the right hand lane). Apologies if I've bored anyone.

The sorts of multipliers you've quoted seem a bit high to me, particularly 1000x. There's no doubt the biggest gains will come if they've damaged the well. If they've flow tested the zone (which clearly they have), they should have a fair idea of how much damage they've done (all wells are damaged during drilling to some degree) and what multiplier they can expect by overcoming it (by fraccing past the damaged zone). Similarly, if the reservoir quality is low, they can model how the frac will perform and should know what multiplier to expect.

As for the lower Meek sand, the way I read into it, the reservoir quality is poor (tight, very low permeability). They've either decided a frac still won't deliver commercial rates and / or the upper meek is far more prospective (better quality, higher permeability). If it's the latter, perhaps they'll look into fraccing it sometime later, but there seems to be better options (Cook Mt, Wilcox).

cheers