Drillbits

Who wrote the book on........

I just finished reading Dan Steward's The Barnett Shale Play - Phoenix of the Fort Worth Basin-A History (2007-Fort Worth Geological Society & The North Texas Geological Society)

The media and (dare I say?) corporate hype combined with the truth of our current technology has and continues to postulate the Marcellus play as no brainer prospect. While the technology is much further advanced than in the early days of the Barnett, I was struck by the amount of trials and errors, truly prospective wildcat nature of not only Mitchell's early Barnett discoveries, but of the play's development even into the early Devon years. Those guys, in 2001, a full 20 years after the first well, after Chevron and other "big boys" had taken their balls and left the Barnett, were still playing with frac types as they related to the geology of the upper and lower containments, the the turn radii, and the frac's pressures, staging, backflow pressures and timing, the drilling locations and orientations relating to various fault types....and the list goes on and on.

Surely, to some extent, those lessons are transferable to the Marcellus but the Marcellus is not the Barnett. There will be new challenges to face and lessons to be learned. Maybe, it's because I'm really a nimrod when it comes to this stuff but, maybe, I'm just a good enough engineer to know that it ain't gonna be no no brainer.