PITTSBURGH—Gone are the days when fracturing one or two stages a day meant progress was going great, according to Chesapeake Energy Corp.’s (CHK) Keith Yankowsky.

“Efficiency has now gone to a new level,” the vice president for Chesapeake’s Appalachia South BU, said during Hart Energy’s DUG East conference June 24. “Now we’re averaging eight a day, 13 a day.”

When it comes to efficiency in today’s environment, sacrificing time or production is not an option.

As operators and service providers push to put the Marcellus shale play and its sister, the Utica, among the world’s natural gas production leaders, they are targeting completions efficiency by utilizing enhanced completions among other techniques and technology to boost production. Efforts appear to be paying off as Marcellus production is forecast to rise to about 16 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in July, about 1 Bcf more than a year ago, based on U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates.

Panelists acknowledged strides made, but admitted there is still room for improvement.

“What we’ve seen recently is a push toward engineered completions,” said Malcolm Yates, stimulation domain manager, U.S., for Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB). Such completions, Yates explains, is anything that goes beyond the generic approach being used on a completion design with a goal of improving EUR or project economics. There are two main components: the near wellbore component, which entails maximizing well recovery using either a single-cluster or multi-cluster approach; and reservoir contact, which focuses on maximizing surface areas in stimulation designs.

He noted engineered completions have included using acoustic measurements to better design completions and understand anisotropy when trying to determine perforation needs. But “as an industry, we aren’t seeing all of our clusters contribute to production.”

Yates mentioned an SPE paper that revealed that only two-thirds of the perforations of more than 200 Marcellus wells studied contributed to production. “So based on that we need to use engineered completions to improve the clusters that aren’t contributing,” Yates said. “We’ve had some success here in the Marcellus as well as in other basins.”

Yankowsky said the company is looking harder at well and cluster spacing, along with the number of stages. “I think as an industry we are probably not doing as well as we could be,” he said of cluster efficiency. But he added there is a lot of great technology available to engineer a completion.

Chesapeake looks at fiber optic technology data to gain insight. Drawing on such data the company looks at “how we perforate on any clusters we have, what kind of diverters we may choose to use, how many holes we shoot and things like that,” Yankowsky said. “It’s really amazing to me when we look at some of the assumptions we were using and some of the things we were seeing from the subsurface pressure.”

An added advantage is being able to change course if adjustments do not work as desired, he said.

“The industry as a whole has gone geometric,” said Joseph Frantz Jr., vice president of engineering technology for Range Resources Corp. (RRC), adding that wells are perforated along laterals every 150 to 200 feet or so. “As we have gone to tighter stage spacing, we knew we were getting the fractures closer and moving the perforations a little bit, and in some cases extensively.” However, geometric completions need further testing, he added, to ensure similar stress and rock quality.

Operators want to gain a greater understanding of the lithology and rock qualities, said Des Murphy, business development technology manager for Halliburton Co. (HAL). The industry is to starting to see more interest in formation evaluation and production logs to better understand rock mechanics and techniques being deployed. “That’s definitely the key to production,” he said.

There are also efforts underway to move away from the cookie cutter approach to completions and to improve cluster efficiency, which Murphy also agreed is not great at the moment.

“We’re putting three to six clusters out there. I know it varies across the board,” Frantz added. The industry has moved toward using larger volumes of water and sand for fracking, but there are areas where the rock is fracturing well and a smaller-sized proppant can be used. “You see folks experimenting out there and trying different designs and getting very economic well performance.”

Yankowsky agreed that a departure from the status quo is evident.

“Using new technology, whether it is fiber optics or other technologies like that, we are trying to refine what we are doing,” he said. “A lot of the things that we thought were happening downhole using past methods aren’t exactly what’s happening. We’re seeing a lot of interesting things, a lot more complexity than we thought we had. I think it’s going to be key to utilize the technologies that are available to evaluate what we’re doing not only while we’re pumping but on the production side.”

Contact the author, Velda Addison, at vaddison@hartenergy.com.