The Permian Basin: The Lower Spraberry May Yield Three Benches http://www.seekingalpha.com/article/3970273
Hello Friends,
FYI - There just may be a Wolfberry/ Spraberry focus with these kind of scenarios in play, in my opinion.
Joy!
Ralpr
RSP, Fang, Energen, EnCana and others have been pursuing the wine rack approach for improved efficiencies over the past 12-18 months. The more that these operators drill, the more they fine tune their development programs
Rock Man,
Please forgive me for my ignorence, but what is a "wine rack approach"? By any chance, is it tapping several different geological plays simultaneosly within a single geographic area (lease) ? If so, what are these areas and what are the benefits/deficits of this type of exploitation?
As for Wine Rack approach, if you check out various industry presentations (e.g. RSP Permian, EnCana, OXY, Diamondback, etc.), you should be able to find figures that demonstrate this lateral well bore drilling / planning approach.
To verbally describe this, imagine you are looking toward a series of lateral / horizontal wellbores that are being drilling toward you. In a "wine rack", there will be a series of laterals that are about 660' apart that are drilled in the same "layer". Then there will be a "layer" of laterals that are about 500' higher or lower than the aforementioned lateral "layer" but the wells are located about 330' above or below the plane of the first layer of laterals. This is the "wine rack" (think about how bottles of wine are laid out in some places).
This approach allows for closer spacing of wells and better access to reservoir and "oil in place" while minimizing frac overlap and the resultant negative impact on individual well bore drainage and related EUR's.
The key to optimizing drainage / exploitation is how close to put the wells in both a vertical offset and horizontal offset perspective to one another.
Hard to describe this approach (if I had a pencil and paper I could do it in 10 seconds). But instead you get hundreds of words.
In some areas, there could be multiple "wine racks" as thousands of feet / multiple formations are tapped / drilled by laterals in the same area. The number of wells in any area will depend on the geology and how much can be produced from various zones using the best drilling and completion techniques.
But not all zones are the same - and there is even significant heterogeneity in a single horizontal interval