The Barnett Shale: Not so simple after all

Interesting article by Republic Energy. Most of it is pretty technical but the title pretty much says it all. The Barnett Shale: Not so simple after all. Many residents in the Barnett Shale are finding this out the hard way.

In addition, wells drilled near major tectonic faults tended to frac toward the fault and break down the fault plane.

Operators have learned the hard way that it is important not to drill and complete wells in close proximity to each other too quickly. When wells are stimulated using nearly a million gallons of water, it is easy to imagine that even with a good 2-3 day flow back of frac water, there is still a lot of water remaining in the formation. When drilling is done on 40 acre spacing and fracture stimulations are only weeks apart, the induced fracture networks appear to be more limited on a per well basis, due to a lack of depletion around the well bore and to the water left in the induced fractures from nearby wells, causing clean up to be more difficult.