Word to the Wise: Montney operators going to greater lengths for production

May 14, 2019

For our Word to the Wise this week, we’ve done some digging into XI’s enhanced drilling database to look at the trend toward longer laterals in the Montney.

Each week, XI Technologies scans its unique combination of enhanced industry data to provide trends and insights that have value for professionals doing business in the WCSB. If you’d like to receive our Wednesday Word to the Wise delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe here.

Players in the Montney continue to test the boundaries of horizontal drilling as they reach further and further with their lateral sections. There was a time when a 5,000-metre well was unheard of. Today, for companies like NuVista, EnCana, and XTO, wells of 7,000 metres and more are the norm.

So, who’s been active in the Montney and how far have they been willing to go for production? All of this data is available in XI’s TourXchange – a cooperative WCSB-wide database of nearly 200,000 daily drilling (Tour) reports in digitized form. TourXchange digital data is easily accessible with the powerful data mining, filtering, and sorting capabilities of XI’s OffsetAnalyst software. Data can be manipulated with the software, exported to Excel, or fed into visualization software for trend analysis.

Take a look at the following series of graphics generated with TourXchange data. The graphics and captions help tell the story of how Montney operators are going to greater lengths for production.

Figure 1: ~7,200 wells drilled that terminate in the Montney in the last nine years.

Figure 2: Montney wells are getting longer – Year over year, increasing average well depth & lateral length.

Figure 3: Lateral trend – Year over year, lateral makes up for the overall well.

Figure 4: Average lateral lengths of the ten most active Montney players in 2018/19.

Figure 5: Average lateral lengths in the top ten fields for Montney drilling in 2018/19.

Based on the data we’ve seen; the trend of longer well lengths and longer laterals is apparent. The question, of course, is “How long is too long?”. Many of our clients are utilizing the XI’s DrilllingSuite, including the TourXchange database and OffsetAnalyst software to gain insights and answers to that very question.

Would you like to know the answer? Contact XI to request a personalized demo. Free limited-time trials are available for qualified companies.