Extreme Reach Wellbores Require Extreme Water Use

Or, the march to the first billion gallon frac pad in Colorado

To understand the massive quantities of water that may be consumed to hydraulically fracture the 26 extreme reach wellbores at Draco, let’s look at the water used by the 394 hydraulic fracturing treatments logged thus far in 2024 to FracFocus, courtesy of the data wizards at Open FF who have made extensive inroads to sanitize and extend the FracFocus data.

Actual Water Use is Twice Estimated for Extreme Reach Wellbores

Let’s start with the upper extremes, as shown in the graph above. From the Cumulative Impacts analysis for the Blue Pad in Adams County, Crestone estimated they would consume between 102.9 and 147 million gallons of water to frac the 7 wells at Blue.

Crestone Peak Resources used a median of 47.7 million gallons of water per well and permanently poisoned 304 million gallons of water, more than twice their upper estimate!

The wellbores at Blue and Sky Ranch have perforated laterals extending 3.8 miles; the 26 wells at Draco will have perforated laterals at least 3.5 miles long. Given Extraction Oil & Gas’ OGDP estimate of 20.8 MM gallons of water consumed per well, is this a suitable estimate for the extreme reach wellbores at Draco? We don’t think so! From the data at Blue and Sky Ranch above, let’s use a conservative estimate of 40 MM gallons per well. This would potentially consume 1,040,000,000 gallons of water for the 26 Draco wells, and thus we expect Draco to be the first billion gallon pad in Colorado. These are truly extreme reach wellbores.

Why Are 5 Mile Wellbores Extreme Reach?

First, let’s look at the 2024 FracFocus data in aggregate:

The first cluster of 6 shallow wells at the left of the chart were drilled to less than 2,000 ft at the Hunt Fed 8-60 pad near Keota on the southwest edge of the Pawnee National Grasslands. The other distinct cluster at top right is for the 5.4 mile extreme reach wellbores drilled at the Blue and Sky Ranch pads, as shown in the detail plot at top.

While wellbores up to 4.5 miles are fairly common 2024, these 5.4 mile wellbores are unique; we’ve never seen anything like it.

Estimating Water Use Is Hard

Why is it so difficult to estimate water use? Let’s do a quick local regression analysis of the data for wells with a measured depth between 1 and 5 miles:

There’s certainly no easy linear parametric fit for this data. It seems a 20 million gallon estimate for wellbores above 3 miles is about the best we can do. We’ll keep an eye on the data as the year progresses.

What Does It All Mean?

We’re in uncharted territory with these extreme reach wellbores, it’s very difficult to make extrapolations from only have 13 wellbores at two adjacent pads. Are the Draco wellbores guaranteed to use 40 million gallons of water each? No, but we won’t be surprised if that ends up being the case.