I am a petroleum engineer who began in the early 70s and I agree nothing is all that new. What is new is its application.
Geologists have known almost since the first wells were drilled in any basin where the hydrocarbons are. The only ones developed were the ones they were told by engineers that commercial producing wells could be made from, the 'low-hanging fruit'. Gradually, as these got picked over, increasingly poorer opportunities that were either smaller, thinner or less permeability were targeted. Never as attractive, but were made out of necessity.
Ask any geologist back then, those poorer quality zones were the ones that bled oil or gas to the mud, that might have kicked.
And the frac technique is so far different than what it was back then that it is almost laughable. I used to frac wells in the Vicksburg down in South Texas in the mid 70s. We thought we did it right, but boy were we wrong, as the newer techniques have been able to multiply the amounts of gas from those wells.
And BTW, getting those wells down quickly do have downsides, as the fluid losses now are overlooked compared to what they were when wells were more carefully drilled. The completions now can 'hide' that problem as they frac past the near wellbore damage caused by that rapid drilling fluid loss to the formation.
The team of people I last worked with in North Dakota were proficient as the geologist, the drilling engineer and the completions engineer worked much more closely together than at any time in my 40+ years.
Yes, gas shows from the Bakken (for an example I am well familiar with) were fairly commonplace, and I had been noting oil shows as well, since the first time I saw samples from it in '79. But an attempt to Drill Stem Test in open hole had engineers pulling their hair out. If you were good enough to find a packer seat in the lower Lodgepole that would hold, when you opened the tool, the shale sloughed, either plugging the tool, or worse, sticking it in the hole. So that. just. didn't. get. done. Sometimes, the really spectacular shows were 'checked out' as deeper zones (usually Duperow or Red River) depleted or watered in and then the formation was perforated during the process of plugging back, either for a Madison zone or for P&A.
There were vertical wells which made 250,000 or more barrels of oil (out of the Bakken), but those tapped natural fractures and were the exception. The Bakken wasn't the original target, but a deeper formation, so those were a bonus.
I agree that MWD (Measurement While Drilling) development was the clincher. I remember doing a directional well in Nevada with a film camera survey tool where the heat flow was so high (hot hole) that the film got too cooked to get an image on about half of the surveys. Every survey involved shutting down for two hours or so to run it and get the results. After that, side door subs and wet connect wireline tools, then pulsers and real MWD. Every step was an order of magnitude faster, to where data was fairly continuous and a full survey took less than five minutes. During that time period, we went from drafting well logs on velum to generating them on computers, too.
I have worked with some good DDs and MWDs, some great Company Hands, and some fantastic rig crews, (and, here and there, I have worked with a$$holes, egomainacs, and incompetents). During slow times, the hands tend to be good, but during a boom, it's a crapshoot. Some are fantastic, some are okay, and many are just new to the job. Those who know they don't know can be taught, the really good hands work well with others as a team--and that shows up in the results, and the egomaniacs and a$$holes should be out selling door to door or something, but not on a drilling rig making an already hard job tougher for everyone. Leadership is especially important, and having people on location who just naturally build teamwork is a real plus.
Every basin is different, every formation has its quirks, and no two wells--even from the same pad--are exactly alike.
It's great when we know precisely the objective and everyone is on board (because everything is operating and monitored 24 hours a day) and you're running 12 hour shifts.
Keep in mind, that by the time the frac crews moved in, I was off on another wellsite, but from what I hear, the multistage fracs and the general advancements in frac techniques helped make that boom as much as any geosteering we ever did. When I started, if you made 300 ft. a day in the Paleozoics, you were doing well. The last well I worked, we were making 3000 ft. a day, and it's even faster just a year later.
It all boils down to a mission oriented environment where what everyone does is important, and anyone dropping the ball affects everyone's performance and the outcome for the oil company in the end.
Then too, some prospects are better than others, but the mission was to make the best well possible on that lease.
