It has been awhile since I have blogged on anything Haynesville related. Most news coming out of that area involves Cotton Valley liquids exploration (see previous blogs) or a transfer of rigs to other more liquids-rich plays. But I really wanted to write something on the Haynesville specifically and nothing that has anything to do with the sob story of depressed natural gas prices, which are at $3.33/Mcf today. So this blog is more or less a workflow of finding something in the data to write about.

Just to get a quick picture of activity, below is a map generated in the Drillinginfo web application showing permits over the past 90 days along with the new DI Rigs layer.

In looking for something of further interest, I pulled in all Haynesville wells from the DI Analytics dataset with a first production date 1/1/2006 forward. I like to use MaxIP as an indicator of sweet spot areas. In this case, the major trend is in De Soto and Red River Parishes with Nacogdoches and San Augustine Counties looking strong on the Texas side.

The Louisiana side is rather interesting. For one, there are a lot more wells, but ultimately a lot more higher producing wells. My initial thought is maybe operators are just drilling longer laterals over there. Take a look at the map below.

If you observe the well spots on the map, colored by lateral length, you’ll see the majority are in the 4000 to 5000 foot range with a small portion in the 5000 to 6000 foot range. The Texas sweet spot trend has more laterals in the 5000 to 6000 foot range and few in the 7000 to 8000 range that tie back to production pretty nicely. However, that same distinction just isn’t clearly evident on the Louisiana side. There are shorter laterals and higher production. The takeaway here is that while there is generally a correlation between lateral length and production, it is not the only driving factor in this case. I have to assume that it must be purely geological.

By looking at the isopach above one can see that the thickest portion is further north in Harrison County and Caddo Parish. Then looking back at the MaxIP map, there are not exactly many “monster wells” up there. However, the structure map sheds some light on this caveat. As we know from the Eagle Ford, sometimes called a “fracking dream,” is high in calcite content at about 70%. So the area on the structure map where the arrow is pointing at calcite-rich portions of the formation is right in the sweet spot zone. I don’t exactly know the calcite content in the Haynesville, but if it is indeed higher, then it is easier to frac and natural gas compounds are more easily extracted from the shale. The El Paso slide also highlights higher gas content and porosity in this same area, all combining to create a fairway of highly producing gas wells.

I realize there are still other factors that drive production in shale gas plays. However, it can cost hundreds of dollars per foot when drilling a lateral. So when an operator can drill a shorter lateral, yet still attain high levels of production, it greatly enhances the well’s rate of return. And that my friends is bloggable material. Check back from time to time to the Haynesville Unconventional Reservoir Blogs. I’d like to do a follow up to this about geology on the Texas side of the Haynesville.