Swift Energy Is Pumping More Fluid & Proppant in Eagle Ford Completions

October 31, 2013 R.T. Dukes

Swift Energy is testing higher volumes of fluid and proppant in Eagle Ford well completions. The company's number of Eagle Ford completions actually slowed to nine in the third quarter, but production grew due to better well performance.

The company's best well on a boe basis in the third quarter produced over 2,300 boe/d. The completion method utilized on the well included 25% more fluid and proppant. Completion testing didn't stop there.

In a well completed in the fourth quarter, the company tested tighter frac stage intervals and perforation clusters along with fluid and proppant volumes that were double Swift's standard completion. The well performed better than previous wells in the area (~1,600 boe/d at 2,250 PSI), so watch for Swift to begin using a completion design that looks more like what we've seen from EOG.

Swift is now targeting a lower interval of the Eagle Ford and is logging the horizontal section of every well to place completions in the most optimal portions of the wellbore.

“Further, we are optimizing our completion designs with longer lateral lengths, increases in frac stages and the volume of frac sand to increase initial production rates and cumulative production of Eagle Ford shale horizontal wells. We expect continued performance and efficiency improvements as we exploit these relationships in our drilling program.”

— Terry Swift, CEO

Swift grew company-wide production by ~10% in the quarter and continues to deploy approximately 80% of its development capital in the Eagle Ford. The company is also marketing assets in Central Louisiana to fund aggressive development plans in South Texas.

BNSF & U.S. Silica Plan Frack Sand Storage in San Antonio

June 21, 2012 R.T. Dukes

BNSF and U.S. Silica have plans to build a silica sand storage facility in San Antonio for the Eagle Ford Shale. The facility will have capacity to store 15,000 tons of frack sand and should be operational by early 2013.

U.S. Silica expects to make 3-4 shipments per month of 10,000 tons of frack sand from Illinois to Texas. The company will ship three grades of dry sand, as well as resin coated proppants from a new facility in Rochelle, IL.

BNSF will run a 100 car train between Ottawa Illinois and San Antonio.

Pioneer Natural Resources Using White Sand in Completions

August 8, 2011 Kenny DuBose

Pioneer's Eagle Ford Shale completion costs are lowered by as much $700,000 when the company uses white sand instead of ceramic proppant. That's an almost 10% savings on wells that costs $7-8 million. The company is testing white sand on 30% of its wells in 2011 and 2012. It will take some time to truly determine is white sand can hold up under the pressure of the Eagle Ford Shale. Pioneer also lowered its drilled but uncompleted well inventory during the second quarter. The company went from 23 wells to just 11 as central gas processing facilities were brought online.

Okay, turning to Eagle Ford Shale, that's Slide 14. The Eagle Ford shale assets are hitting their stride. As planned, we're running 12 rigs. The average lateral length of the wells is now up to about 5,500 feet. The economics are quite outstanding as we've always discussed, owing to the rich condensate and generally liquid-rich nature of these wells. We're seeing very good performance in Dewitt County, offsetting Black Hawk. One thing we're doing, as we discussed in the last call, is to push the envelope with regard to the use of white sand as a proppant. We have already stimulated 10 wells, and the performance of the wells looked very good and very similar to the direct offset wells where we used ceramics for the proppant. So the idea this year is about 30% of our wells this year, we'll be using white sand, and that's the number also planned for next year, 2012, about 30% of the wells.

And importantly, that reduces the cost of the wells, something like $700,000 per well, which is very significant, if you look at the future drilling campaign. Infrastructure build-out continues. We now have 6 of our central gas processing facilities completed. A seventh will be completed by the end of this quarter and eight in the next quarter. So we are really ahead of the game when it comes to build-out of infrastructure.
And the result as you see on Slide 15 is the ability to put more wells on production. We've met our goal in the second quarter of putting wells on production in the Eagle Ford. We put 18 wells on production. That's reflecting the frac bank being significantly reduced as well. The frac banks starting the second quarter was 22 or 23 wells, now it is 11 at the end of the second quarter, which is basically our minimum run rate, which is one -- basically one well per rig. But you can see, as we bring the 2 new CGPs online this quarter, we have a substantial ability to add a lot more wells to production. And in addition to that, we'll see a similar ability to do that as we get into the fourth quarter. So this area is going to be ramping up dramatically as shown on Slide 16, with the crude oil production well count increasing, third quarter should see a significant increase as shown on the slide, up to 14,000 to 17,000 BOE per day.
You can see we're going to 14 rigs next year. Those 14 rigs are all under contract. And then 16 rigs and 19 rigs looking forward.

Read the full press release at SeekingAlpha.com