8,370 lateral feet drilled in 24 hours
WPX Energy, in a post on Facebook, recorded what may be a new drilling record today. The company may have chalked up the fastest lateral drilling ever achieved for an oil and gas well.
According to the post on the company’s Facebook page, WPX’s San Juan Basin team, specifically the Cyclone Rig 32, drilled 8,370 feet on the lateral section of the 745H well. This equates to an average of nearly 350 feet per hour.
For reference, lateral rates of penetration were often 100 feet per hour or less in 2011. Schlumberger presented a case study in 2011 in the Cana Woodford where it managed to improve lateral drilling rates to 120 feet per minute. In 2016, Drilling Contractor reported record Marcellus wells that were drilling at one mile per day.
WPX believes that its new well may be the longest lateral length drilled by the oil and gas industry in a single day.
Wells drilled very quickly can sometimes be more sloppy, with unintended curvature and other difficulties, but WPX reports that this was not the case. According to senior drilling engineer Justin Beougher, the well was “100% in the geologic target, with a smooth wellbore with casing to bottom easily.”
