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Permalink Reply by Brian Powers on June 11, 2013 at 9:42am

Ron-

Without seeing the same report that you see, I'll speculate and say that "plugged OG well" is a plugged oil/gas well. All wells eventually must be plugged due to depletion, mechanical problems encountered during drilling/completion operations,  because productive rock just doesn't exist, or a variety of miscellaneous reasons. Not really a big deal unless you got a creditor to allow you to "bet on the come" and you're on the hook for things you bought on credit (expecting an imminent and/or significant royalty income stream)  and now can't afford to keep. I plugged a lot of wells during my time in industry; some of the plugging operations were nearly as complicated as drilling the well in the first place.

 

Brian

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Permalink Reply by Ron Griz on June 11, 2013 at 10:41am

An unreliable souce, mentioned that they may have hit a fault while drilling. But then they did frac the well shortly after drilling.  We did get a notice that we were in the production unit for the well. Since then,they did complete the seismic testing in the area and drilled another well on the pad.

Does plugging the well mean that they do not plan to use it in production?  Can they redrill it to go around the fault? 

It would be nice if they were not so tight-lipped about the wells they drilled.

(and no we haven't spent our future royalties yet, we were kind of hopeing that they would hold off connecting the wells to the pipeline until the price of gas went up)  

 

If a well is listed on the PA spud report, does that mean it was drilled??

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Permalink Reply by Brian Powers on June 11, 2013 at 2:16pm

Ron -

In my time I was obligated to reveal data to regulatory officials and to representatives of partners who shared costs/risks of projects with the operator; the few times I freely divulged information other than production data to lessees was only done out of courtesy.

 

Drilling into faults is a key risk in any well and is one of several reasons that might result in having to plug a well. The first time that I was involved in this situation, we drilled ahead blind(no data) to the planned total depth of the lateral and then completed the well. We lost an enormous amount of fluid while drilling blind, and it took a long, expensive time to coil-in the well to clean it up enough to turn the well into the gathering system. The second time it happened, we drilled ahead blind for an additional 500 feet and then stopped and  completed the well. We could not keep the hole full of fluid  while running the completion tubing and the well subsequently blew out. This cost a lot of money to fix, but resulted in no injuries or other damage (beyond our pride, that is).

 

Plugged wells can be re-entered and re-drilled; downhole problem areas can be avoided, though in my experience, the drill bit is the least desirable way to delineate a fault plane system.

 

Brian

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Permalink Reply by Oliver Perry on June 12, 2013 at 12:02am

Ron, you asked,

"If a well is listed on the PA spud report, does that mean it was drilled??"

I believe a well can show up on the PA spud report, but not be completed. Technically, to spud a well means to begin drilling it.

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Permalink Reply by Tom R on June 12, 2013 at 3:35am

Not sure what report you may have looked at. I just brought up the production reports for 2nd half 2012 with non-producing wells included. According to that all six permitted wells have been spudded but 5 are listed as not completed. The A5H shows as Temporarily Shut-In with a completion date of 7/22/11. You say there is not currently a pipeline connection, so that makes sense. The shut-in is just a temporary plug for safety reasons (at least from what I've been told).

Just looked at the spud report as well, that lists the A3H as a vertical well while the H usually indicates a horizontal. May be a mix up in data entry or it may have been a well the check depth of formations and was plugged once the info was collected.

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