Frac volumes have recently increased to about 40 Olympic swimming pools per horizontal shale well.
An Olympic pool is about 165 ft long x 56 ft wide x 7 ft deep, or about 12,000 bbl. If we assume a horizontal well runs in the middle along the long side of the pool, that’s a volume intensity of 72 bbl/ft. The average volume intensity of a US shale well is about 50 bbl/ft - that represents a 10,000 ft long pool with 5.5 swim lanes.
Frac volumes per well have increased by three orders of magnitude since the start of frac’ing in the late 1940s. A factor of 1,000 growth may sound like a lot for frac volume change, but the reality is that the volume per frac has not been changed by that much.
The 500,000 bbl in a single average shale well has to be divided by the effective cluster count. Assuming a roughly 80% cluster efficiency we collectively gather from fiber-optics observed hits and perf erosion monitoring, today’s effective cluster count per well is in the hundreds. That means volume per frac is 1,000 - 2,000 bbls - just a few times more than the early fracs. The big difference with the past is that we now place these fracs in source rock every ~20 ft.
And that is going swimmingly.
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