Marcellus Drilling Efficiency Gains Reported in Northeast PA

Marcellus Shale drilling efficiency gains reported

From the Article by Andrew Maykuth, Philadelphia Inquirer, December 20, 2013

TROUT RUN, Pa. — When David Dewberry landed in Pennsylvania in 2010, the veteran of the migratory worldwide oil-and-gas workforce said he required more than a month to drill a typical Marcellus Shale natural gas well.

On December 4th,  a crew under Dewberry’s direction dug into the mountaintop of a state forest near here with a diamond-studded drill bit. Dewberry reckons it will require only 16 days to finish drilling the well’s full length, more than 2 1/2 miles.

“Since I came up here three years ago, it’s 200 percent better,” said Dewberry, who manages this Lycoming County, Pa., site in Loyalsock State Forest for Seneca Resources Corp.

The well not only will require half the time to drill, the bore will extend farther horizontally than older wells. And, if it performs like other wells in the area, it will produce a staggering amount of gas.

When it’s done, the towering rig will crawl 20 feet and begin drilling another well. Seneca plans to complete nine wells in an assembly-line fashion on this site, which is the size of five football fields. 

“We’ve become so much more efficient,” Dewberry said. Marcellus Shale exploration companies are drilling bigger wells in less time at less cost, and they are producing more natural gas than ever.

Despite a reduction in the number of drill rigs operating in Pennsylvania in the past two years because of the low price of natural gas, each rig is accomplishing much more. The Marcellus, which includes wells in West Virginia, now produces nearly a fifth of the nation’s natural gas.

Many of the improvements in recent years are attributed to the experience producers have acquired in the Marcellus formation. “You experiment until you hit the jackpot,” said Terry Engelder, a Pennsylvania State University geoscientist and leading expert in Appalachian black shales.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration, recognizing that the drill-rig count is an obsolete measure of output, recently presented a new way to quantify efficiency that takes into account drilling speed and production. By that measure, the Marcellus accounts for much of the growth in the nation’s gas production.

Despite the ongoing controversy over fracking – activists want a drilling moratorium in Pennsylvania because they say it may cause groundwater pollution and other problems – the industry is investing here as though it will be impeded only by market conditions. And it is doing its best to make the business economical.

Seneca Resources, based in Pittsburgh, has been drilling gas wells in Pennsylvania for a century. It’s owned by National Fuel Gas Co. of Buffalo, N.Y., whose utility has 733,000 retail gas customers in western New York and northwestern Pennsylvania.

Seneca’s drilling experience was confined to developing conventional shallow wells, not the deep shale wells that run laterally underground for a mile or more. After the Marcellus discovery, Seneca teamed with an experienced deep-well driller, EOG Resources, until it developed its own in-house expertise.

“This is a proven field now,” said Dewberry, a native of Alabama who got married in Pennsylvania and built a home in Tioga County, Pa. “We know what we’ve got, and we know what we need to do.”

NOTE: Going North on US Route 15 out of Williamsport, the county seat of Lycoming County, PA, one comes to Trout Run at PA Route 14, heading North toward Bradford County then on to Elmyra, NY. The Loyalsock State Forest and Black Moshannon State Forest are very rugged and incredibly beautiful. Four major Native American Indian Trails met in this area.