to get in the game or we’d miss out on this opportunity. A few days later, I watched in real time from a conference room in Pittsburgh as we fracked a well in the Barnett Shale – roughly 1,200 miles away. EOG had partnered with Pinnacle Technologies to gather data that would allow the company to improve its production and increase the overall recovery of natural gas from its shale wells. Pinnacle developed a way to “hear” rocks breaking as a frac job progressed through the various stages. The sounds – picked up by geophones placed in a nearby “monitor” wellbore – helped determine the extent and effectiveness of the frac job. As the frac job progressed, Pinnacle’s software converted the sounds to small points that were plotted on a wellbore and subsurface diagram. Those points were then projected
We needed to rely on our technical expertise – or "use the drill bit" – to get in the game or we'd miss out on this opportunity.
drilled into the Marcellus Shale formation. The sounds (frac points) are plotted along the wellbore. The colors represent the different frac stages. As I continued to watch, I realized this technology would be our ticket to winning the bid for Seneca’s land in the Marcellus Shale . To my knowledge, no one else was using this advanced technology. I convinced Mark to let us share this top-secret, state-of-the-art information with Seneca.
onto the big screen in front of us. Each stage was color coded. The example diagram to the right, which appeared in trade publication American Oil & Gas Reporter in May 2012, gives you an idea of what happened with Pinnacle’s technology... You can see the location of the vertical monitor well on the left side of the image, as well as the path of the horizontal well
50 | September 2017
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