some more analysis of gretel & abercombie, page-3

Hi k273

I initially wondered about the well directional orientation myself, and it is possibly a factor. However I have concluded that the reason most wells are oriented the way they are is farily simple - the geometry of well spacing. Samson's FP wells are all "angled" - i.e. they are diagonal to a north/south or east/west direction. A lot of other wells you see in the area are north/south, and quite a few are east/west as well. Only a minority are angled the way Samson's wells are.

That's because operators orient the wells to get the most efficient use of the well's spacing. Samson's wells are short laterals on a single 640 acre spacing. Orienting them at an angle will allow them to be longer than if they were north/south or east/west - think back to your pythagoras theory from school. Conversely wells with long laterals - around 9,000 ft - require a 1280 acre spacing, or 2 x 640 acre spacings.

A section is 1 mile long and 1 mile wide, and a mile is 5260 ft. So a well in a single 640 acre spacing could be up to 5260 ft in the north/south or east/west directions, or up to about 7,300 ft if placed on the diagonal. Long laterals can be up to 10,520 ft in the north/south or east/west direction, and since most long laterals are less than 10,000 ft, they do not place them on the diagonal within a 2 section spacing.

So getting back to Gretel and wells within that zone where there may be fault lines (thats still assuming thats the problem) there is some scope to change the orientation by varying lateral length vs well spacing if they need to. Maybe thats the difference between Beck and Gretel, I dont know. Certainly 3D would be useful to determine that.

Cheers, Sharks.