James J. Volker
Analyst · Wells Fargo
Well you hit on 2 of the points. The third one is, I would say, that I'm taking the direct dial phone numbers of all of our drilling engineers who were responsible for these record costs, and I'm pulling the plug because I'm tired of having people call to try to hire them away. They're doing a great job for us. They've implemented, as we've talked about in the past, a drill wells on paper plan. And this is where, essentially, we maximize the efficiency of the drilling operation. And we have, in my opinion, the roughest, toughest, best, most efficient group of both, I'm going to say, younger and more older and more experienced drilling engineers working together on every well to maximize in 500-foot intervals the penetration rates that we get. To see that all supplies, parts, chemicals, repairs, everything is delivered to the rig in such a manner as to not slow down the drilling operation. So whether we're talking about bit type, mud weight, weight on the bit or the pre-planning work that goes into the particular rigs that we have working for us out there, all of that, I say, ends up with drilling costs currently in the range of around $7 million. And you can see that when you look at our budget, just take the net wells and divide it into the cost that we have there at Sanish. And keep in mind that, that costs is even slightly skewed by some of the non-operated wells, which as you point out, have higher costs associated with them. So I can't say enough about that. Those are the 3 main reasons.