American Oil and Gas Reporter - November 2017 - 66

SpecialReport: Marcellus/Utica Activity
planned Harmon Creek processing plant.
An additional two wells were brought on
line in the second quarter with continued
outstanding results, Degner states.
The average initial production from
each well in the four-well pad is 29.5
million cubic feet a day of natural gas
equivalent (67 percent liquids), with a
30-day average IP of 19.6 MMcfe/d and
average lateral length of 9,247 feet that
includes 46 stages.
"The wells on that pad are exceeding
our forecast by 65 percent," Degner continues. "Truly, our team has rolled up its
sleeves. It is amazing how these wells
have responded. The rock quality is
tremendous."

With the help of a proprietary software package, Range Resources is striving to optimize
every aspect of its projects. The company indicates that the process has helped it ﬁnd
value in a number of ways, such as avoiding midstream bottlenecks.

The company also cites another aspect
of its scientific due diligence as a point
in its favor. "Chesapeake has the unique
experience of operating in more than 10
basins, and we pull every idea we have
into each basin," Patterson says. "We
also have a full core laboratory on our
campus (in Oklahoma City). We are very
blessed with a lot of advantages."
Burleson adds that the core laboratory
helps the company learn everything "from
raw mechanics to reservoir study, from the
frac job through the rest of the well's life.
Chesapeake reports it has 2.2 Bcf/d
of gross productive capacity in the Marcellus and expects to maintain its gross
production at or around its total capacity
through the remainder of 2017, depending
on gas prices. Burleson says Chesapeake
is "picking up the pace" and expects to
place on production as many as 40 Marcellus wells in the second half of 2017,
compared with 11 wells in the year's
first half.
Paradigm Shift
Dennis Degner, vice president for the
Appalachia division at Range Resources,
describes an industry paradigm shift. Rig
count numbers are no longer the telling
indicator they once were, he considers,
and thanks to progressively lengthening
laterals, the number of days a rig remains
on a site no longer means everything it
once did, either.
"The most important number is what
66 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

dollars spent deliver the most back to the
division," he says. "We are looking at
dollars a foot."
For example, Degner observes, Range's
average lateral length across its 515,000
acres in southwestern Pennsylvania
stretched 7,195 feet in 2016. In 2017, its
laterals average 9,110 feet. Range set a
record for drilling 3,592 feet in one day
in the second quarter of 2015, he says,
but the company routinely drills more
than 5,000 feet a day in 2017 and once
even exceeded 6,000 feet.
According to Degner, Range Resources
has a shallow spudder program. It operates
four air rigs that drill the wells' shallow
vertical portion, after which it brings in
one of four larger rigs at the kickoff point
to drill the lateral.
"We have drilled all 10 of our longest
laterals this year," Degner observes, "the
longest being 15,254 feet, which I believe
is the longest Marcellus well reported to
date."
According to the company, it drilled
120 wells in 2016, placing about a third
in the dry gas window and splitting the
other two-thirds between the super-rich
and wet gas windows. "Both the superrich and wet gas produce into the same
processing system," he explains. "That is
just a Btu delineation."
In the northern portion of Range's super-rich acreage, Range announced results
in the first quarter from two wells brought
on line from a four-well pad near the

Optimization 2.0
A seven-well pad on the western edge
of the super-rich area has been completed
with an average well IP of 29.1 MMcfe/d
(73 percent liquids) and an average lateral
length of 10,685 feet with 54 stages, he
says. On the eastern edge of the dry gas
area, a four-well pad has been brought
on line with an average well IP of 31.4
MMcf/d and an average lateral length of
11,100 feet with 56 stages, Degner describes. Laterals on two of the four wells
extend beyond 15,000 feet.
Instead of fixating only on hydraulic
fracturing technique, Degner says Range
focuses more on the broader category of
optimization. "We have purchased a proprietary software package," he offers. "Part
of that package focuses on optimized design
and well predictability and the impacts to
gas flow that we take to the midstream infrastructure. We have been able to bring
tremendous value to the company and avoid
production that would have been constrained
by the system. We have not gone from
Frac 1.0 to Frac 2.0, but instead from Optimization 1.0 to Optimization 2.0.
Degner points out that Range enjoys
the advantage of possessing data from
the more than 1,000 wells that it has
drilled in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, he says, it has drilled three
Utica wells in the last couple years.
In another positive development, Degner
reports, the zero-vapor protocol that Range
has deployed during the past five years is
proving very successful. "We are enhancing
our emissions control and vapor recovery,"
he contends. "We have seen a 70 percent
decrease in detected leaks, which already
were at one of the lowest levels in the industry. This effort includes regular leak
American Oil and Gas Reporter - November 2017

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