Regarding oil, our individual wells are performing as expected. But we underestimated the downtime for patent drilling and delays for frac equipment. As we previously stated, optimizing shale oil or gas recovery requires drilling five or six side-by-side wells, frac-ing them simultaneously and only then turning all wells to production. Therefore, if frac equipment is delayed, it doesn't affect only one well but cascades to five or six wells and the associated production. We believe our updated volume estimates now account for this methodology.
To give you a little more color on these frac equipment delays, we're currently experiencing delays in almost every one of our divisions and have about 100 wells experiencing delays. Since most of our budget is oil wells, this disproportionately affects oil volumes. These delays won't go away anytime soon. And our new 2011 and 2012 growth forecasts assume the frac delays continue until at least mid-2011.
Mark Papa
That's a good point. Let me correct one thing. I misspoke a little bit earlier. I said 160 miles for the Eagle Ford. That's really 120 miles with a possible 20-mile extension. In terms of the frac situation between April and today, it's really gotten worse, I mean, worse from a producer's viewpoint. It's literally at a point now where if we want to frac a well, and we call up one of the major service companies, typically they'll say, "Well, we can get to you maybe right after the first of year. And the price, we'll tell you the first of year. But it's going to be even higher than your worst case scenario to frac this well. And if you don't like that particular price availability, well, we've got a lot of other people had a needing fracs. But I would say we certainly had a peak drilling activity several years ago, when gas was $9 or $10 and there was a frenzy of activity. But the frac situation was not as tight then as it is today, in my opinion.
Jotkut analyytikot ovat arvioineet ensi vuonna olevan ylikapasiteettiä painepumppauksessa, mutta tarpeeseen näyttää tulevan uusi kalusto.
Ainoa pumppari omassa omistuksessa on Gasfrac.
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