Abstract
The Bone Springs play of South East New Mexico USA is currently in full development. The play contains three pay sections, with all, two or sometimes just one pay section providing economic hydrocarbons for Operators to develop and exploit. This paper will discuss the evolution of how the play was developed by abandoning vertical wellbores, and then using horizontal wells with multi-stage fracture treatments. The paper will focus on how each hurdle was overcome to discover economically beneficial technology including: lateral azimuth; lateral length; frac fluid and proppant selection; fracture design and evaluation as well as production results for each hurdle.
Further discussions will emphasize the selection of lateral landing depth and the impact of depth on propping each fracture, the evolution from perf-and-plug to selective isolation with usage of sliding sleeve technology as well as the final state-of-the art on well design for the play. All of these facets are proven to demonstrate an improved production and cash flow to generate an optimized well plan.
Key learnings will be in the area of logic, the workflow to determine key anchor points from data and understanding trade-offs for less expensive yet not as rewarding technologies and practices.
