Have some acreage available for lease in Culberson county in blocks 64 T2 & blocks 65 t1. Any activity in that area?
Thanks.
Clayton Williams land men are all over that area buying up leases.
Lawrence, What sort of drilling activity is going on in these areas?
None, so far, but they are scouting locations for multilevel horizontal wells.....many will be quad or
octal horizontal wells going in every direction from a single pad. Noble Permian is getting into
the octal horizontal well business, too. They have a couple of quad horizontal wells within a mile of
me and they made GOOD wells. Of course they bought all that land and prospects from Clayton
Williams......so I figure Clayton is looking to sack up as much of Culberson county as he can to
make another 10 Billion bucks.
Thanks Lawrence for the info.
Checked DrillingInfo as to recently filed leases (not a lot so far) - looks like brokers are paying lower royalties in these two areas - 16.67% (1/6th).
Note that these areas are a lot more gas prone and very different from the "hot" eastern part of the county as to activity.
I have attached a PDF showing horizontal permits in Culberson Co over the past 1000 days. Pretty obvious focus in the deeper part section on the eastern side of the county.
127-CulbersonHzPermitspast1000days.pdf (641 KB)The high volume wet gas wells will be drilled south of Van Horn along the railroad and south to the
'point' of Culberson and Jeff Davis along the Rio Grand. There's a high concentration of elongated
anticlines oriented side by side in that area and the trend continues right under the Rio Grand Rift (river)
into Coahuila and Nuevo Leon states of Mexico....where Devon operating under another name is
rapidly exploiting that whole area. In five years there will be thousands of wet gas high volume
horizontal cluster wells just south of the border and they will have 25 or 30 processing plants
there exporting LNG to markets all over the world.
So, it is imperative the southern Delaware in Reeves and Culberson be developed more rapidly
so the USA and especially Texas can establish and maintain a monopoly on exported liquified natural gas for fuel in third world countries....wresting more customer share away from Russia, Saudi/Middle East, and China. Trump knows this. He's a really tough competitor advocating US dominance of the
energy economic sector worldwide. The regulations are going to be relaxed so we, the USA, can not only compete, but BEAT the rest of the world's players at energy exploration, production, and distribution.
Clayton Williams and many others will be doing their best to get as much of those 100s of Billions and
a few Trillions of dollars from our energy trade.
That China Draw area you highlighted (Culberson Hz Permits past 1000 days.pdf) is a big test
area for Conoco-Phillips unconventional drilling/production exploration branch. They have a lot
of acreage leased there.
In China Draw, located in Texas, the Permian team recently completed its first 80-acre high-low spacing test. At Zia Hills, in New Mexico, the team completed its first 20-foot cluster spacing pilot test.
See? Cluster horizontal wells on the same pad....what Clayton Williams was pioneering.
in Verhalen
Has Devon announced any results from their activities in this area? I know that they and Cabot (under the Cody Petroleum name) have done a lot of drilling (science wells and horizontals) in southern part of Delaware Basin with no reported results. Which for a public company would seem strange if they were having good results.
Lawrence,
I hope your optimism as to future activity in this area comes true, but a ton of third party capital for Mid Stream pipelines and processing plants needs to step up and create the infrastructure to allow this to take place (assuming the wet gas reserves are there to exploit). Apache has already gone public as to slowing down their Alpine High development earlier this year due to factors beyond their control, i.e. increased costs associated with contractors and gas marketing related issues.
The physical location of this area versus other wet gas markets is a huge issue, Whereas the Eagle Ford and NE USA is in a much better infrastructure system and closer to LNG ports, this part of the Delaware Basin is at the "end of the line" which is a huge economic negative.
Perhaps one day a midstream group will create a western outlet for this gas to the West Coast to better access the Asian markets. Right now, the HUGE gas reserves in SE Africa and Persian Gulf are in much better positions to access and exploit these major market areas.
Good points about China Draw and Zia Hills - just need to keep in mind that the subsurface geology and reservoir issues are very different between the two area. Targets in Zia Hills are much deeper (by several thousand feet) than those in the same section in China Draw. This creates less pressure and storage capacity as you move west. Plus the section as you move west gets much more gassy and less liquid prone due to the overall thermal history of the Delaware Basin and the eventual "basin flipping" that took the western area from "deep" to present day shallow.
An additional big difference between the two areas is the associated of more conventional reservoir material (e.g. sands and silts) with the section in the eastern part of the basin (e.g. Zia Hills) due to shedding off the Central Basin Platform than what one sees as you move west (and more distal and removed from these conventional reservoir components).
Very different types of reservoirs with different composition and reserves and recovery factors.
Cabot/Cody has two exploratory wells on the east side of Wild Rose Pass (Hwy 17) in Jeff Davis county/Davis Mountains.. I was by the locations Friday and one of the wells (furthest souttheast) was flaring gas.
They have two more exploratory wells 10 miles west of Hwy 17 on the south side of FM7078
along Cherry Creek on two ranches. Those are not doing anything right now....dunno if they are
dusters or what. But, they are looking in the wrong places. The high liquids gas wells they
want to develop are further north of the upthrust of the Davis mountains between Wild Rose Pass and Saddleback mountain. They need to be drilling on the NORTH side of FM7078 to hit the good stuff. Apache has that leased up and will be moving in there soon when they get more of their
gathering infrastructure built.
I have interest in Section 3 Block 97 culberson and trying to find out if there is any activity in that area or if anyone anticipates some? As you can tell I really don’t know anything about it but trying to figure it out. Thanks for any help. Peggy