Jeffrey Ventura
Analyst · Johnson Rice
Yes, we can talk about that. When you look at, we really have three types of wells. And let me talk about them conceptually and I'll give some more specific numbers. You've got development wells in the Southwest part of the play. Then you've got step-out wells in the Southwest, and then you got wells in the Northeast. And then eventually, you'll role into that same category there. When you look at a development well, a pad well in the Southwest, we're approaching $4 million, like we said, in the development mode. Current AFEs are actually $4.2 million, so we're getting pretty close. And then when you step out, like I said I mentioned a well earlier that's made just over 18 million a day, 35-mile step-out. When you step out, those wells are going to be a lot more expensive. One, you've got -- instead of allocating the pad over multiple wells, it's on one well. When you drill step-out wells, you typically, you may cork part of the well, run a bunch of micro-seismic, run a bunch of experiments and all those kinds of things. Plus you aren't allocating the water impoundments [ph] and rows and stuff across multiple wells, either. So those are two kinds of wells. Then when you go to the Northeast in Lycoming County, the wells are roughly 2,000 feet deeper. So when you look at current drilling, we're looking at, for this year in the Marcellus, we're looking at 195 wells, roughly. That's our expectation of that. 172 would be in the Southwest, 23 in the Northeast. If you look at the average of the 4.2 plus the higher-cost step-out wells and delineation plus some science, those wells are going to average on the order of 4.4 million probably per well in the Southwest. And you could add roughly 1 million for the wells in the Northeast. And I expect with time, literally, again, if you go back and look at what we have, 85% of that acreage in the Southwest has been derisked, so when you look at our acreage position, you use 80-acre spacing there and you use -- and just assume 80% of the acreage is drilled, that's over 4,600 wells in the Southwest. I guarantee you, with the technical team we have, when you let them drill year in and year out over, literally, thousands of wells, I have high hopes that those guys are really going to drive those costs down dramatically from not only where we are today or our expectation, of course [ph] they'll break through that. Sort of what John was saying earlier, there will be a lot of capital efficiency gains that will come with time, and I believe the same thing will happen up in the Northeast also.