Sep 17, 2026 · 20 min · 10 segments
Dane Gregoris and Steve Diederichs recap a Houston and Midland roadshow, where higher oil prices have operators testing new ways to pull more barrels out of existing rock. Surfactants, lightweight…
Steve DiederichsGuest
Dane GregorisHost
Maybe if you could walk me through, what are your thoughts on maybe to, to, to kick off kind of the longer laterals and, and, and kind of creative drilling techniques, we could bucket like horseshoe wells into that mix.
Um, what are your thoughts on the effectiveness of, uh, of, of those techniques and what you're seeing in the data and then pushback or commentary that you're also hearing from clients on that sort of creative drilling or lateral length extension?
Yeah, so it's the one that I would say we've had the clearest tie between cost improvements over the last number of years.
You know, in the last couple of years, especially in the oily basins, we've seen three milers become more and more commonplace.
And very quickly, that's been replaced by four milers as being sort of the bleeding edge here.
Um, so a number of basins and operators where we're starting to see four milers, um, from the actual recovery impact, uh, all the work that we've done, uh, shows, you know, three mile wells on a per foot EUR basis come right in line with two mile wells, very little in the way of degradation there.
The four-mile subset, it's pretty early in almost every basin where we're seeing that get tested.
And we are seeing, I would say, suppressed per-foot peak rates, but very flat declines associated with that.
Um, but our expectation is it'll come in fairly close in terms of EUR side of things.
So, um, you know, we see very meaningful cost savings, typically close to sort of 20% or so on a per foot basis from two to three milers.
So I think we are starting to get to the point of kind of diminishing returns there.
But on a kind of total impact basis, it's unlocked a lot of resources, especially in tier two portions of the play, albeit not necessarily improving well performance.
As I mentioned, the per foot recovery is not ticking up associated with this, just the cost of supply coming down.
And this is drilling in a straight line four miles, or is this the kind of U-turn or horseshoe technique?
So on the U-turn side of things, Cord is the first name that we've seen drilled.
Maybe if you could walk me through, what are your thoughts on maybe to, to, to kick off kind of the longer laterals and, and, and kind of creative drilling techniques, we could bucket like horseshoe wells into that mix.
Um, what are your thoughts on the effectiveness of, uh, of, of those techniques and what you're seeing in the data and then pushback or commentary that you're also hearing from clients on that sort of creative drilling or lateral length extension?
Yeah, so it's the one that I would say we've had the clearest tie between cost improvements over the last number of years.
You know, in the last couple of years, especially in the oily basins, we've seen three milers become more and more commonplace.
And very quickly, that's been replaced by four milers as being sort of the bleeding edge here.
Um, so a number of basins and operators where we're starting to see four milers, um, from the actual recovery impact, uh, all the work that we've done, uh, shows, you know, three mile wells on a per foot EUR basis come right in line with two mile wells, very little in the way of degradation there.
The four-mile subset, it's pretty early in almost every basin where we're seeing that get tested.
And we are seeing, I would say, suppressed per-foot peak rates, but very flat declines associated with that.
Um, but our expectation is it'll come in fairly close in terms of EUR side of things.
So, um, you know, we see very meaningful cost savings, typically close to sort of 20% or so on a per foot basis from two to three milers.
So I think we are starting to get to the point of kind of diminishing returns there.
But on a kind of total impact basis, it's unlocked a lot of resources, especially in tier two portions of the play, albeit not necessarily improving well performance.
As I mentioned, the per foot recovery is not ticking up associated with this, just the cost of supply coming down.
And this is drilling in a straight line four miles, or is this the kind of U-turn or horseshoe technique?
So on the U-turn side of things, Cord is the first name that we've seen drilled.
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