Oh yeah, that is washing out the perfs in my venacular.
I don't believe the formation was actually fractured, but simply to get past the skin damage around the well that came about with drilling and completion fluids.
The earliest true fracturing I recall hearing about was in the 50s before hydraulic fracturing was taking off.
Actually involved lowering nitroglycerin down the wellbore (how would like to have had that job?)and setting it off across from the perfs.
Spectacularly unsuccessful.
Well, that's what has come to be known as 'making dents in the learning curve'.
I worked my first horizontal well in 1990, and the experimentation from there was great to be a part of. We changed drilling fluids, we tried drilling underbalanced, and often found the solutions to our problems were simpler, rather than more complex. We found a few things that just did not work as well as others (and didn't use those again). We drilled laterals from windows cut in old production casing, we drilled the one, two, and three lateral wells in one and two section spacings from a single wellbore.
We left open hole in the pay on the early wells, only running casing down to the pay zone, until a frac pumper went down in the middle of a frac and collapsed an entire lateral. After that, all the pay zones got liners.
We had a rig go ahead of ours and drill the vertical wellbore and case it, and then came in with a modified workover rig and tubing to drill short radius laterals (before the Bakken, in the Ratcliffe). Then came dedicated, single wellbore locations for drilling longer laterals, with larger rigs, drilled from spud to Total Depth with the same big rig. Then top drives, and drilling a stand (~95 ft., three joints of drill pipe [a 'joint' is roughly 31 ft.] pre-connected), so that eliminated two connections and the delay involved in making them, as well as the disruption of pulling tools off bottom while doing so, which enabled better steering from a drilling standpoint.
Then the walking rigs on well pads where multiple wells could be drilled from the same location, often parallel to each other down the lease. All this time mud motors, MWD tools, battery technology, drill bits were being refined, performing better, longer, drilling faster.
But every innovation or attempt to make one resulted in something learned, either a new way to do things or a way not to.
Now, drilling is honed to an art form. On that first well, we were thrilled to make 500 ft. in a day. Now, we can drill 500 ft. an hour in the pay, often held back just by the ability to clear the cuttings from the hole fast enough to prevent problems.
Steering once was done by comparing the strung out markers on the gamma ray log in the lateral wellbore with the true vertical depth log (of a vertical wellbore or the one we were drilling) by eye--always 40+ feet behind the bit, and by subtle changes, often misleading, in the rock itself, obtained an hour after it was drilled (transit time to the surface). Paper copies were hand delivered, then floppy disks, then thumb drives, now e-mail, which is safer than networking computers from a slew of different sources.
Now we can compare our current place in the well with those offset wells, vertical logs, and even our own well path to see where we are by using software tailored for the job, far better than the primitive spreadsheet graphs we used early on.
In reality, with that, the job has gotten easier, at least until mother nature throws a monkey wrench into the works with a fault or sharp change in formation dip.
From a geological standpoint: The Bakken is a dream, as is the Three Forks. Not that they don't have their quirks, but for the most part the formations are continuous, even if the lithology varies. I have seen everything from fine sand to pelletal limestone in the Middle Bakken, with a lot of dolomite in between. Markers, layers to navigate by, may or may not be present, depending on where you are, and I have steered a couple of wells by first going over the vertical wells in the field, triangulating multiple cross sections across the field and the planned well path, and going almost entirely by the numbers. It worked.
The Three Forks is a more consistent assemblage of rock types, dolomite and fine sand/silt with sometimes laterally discontinuous shale beds, which may or may not be usable as markers for navigation purposes. Both formations have been known to give responses to steering attempts which can be misleading, and again, it is back to using the gamma ray data for the final decisions on steering.
That said, the pay horizons seem more continuous, less partitioned than in the Permian well I ran Mass Spec on, and I would love to run mass spec continuously on mud gasses in the Bakken and Three Forks to test that. That tool enables the identification of impermeable reservoir boundaries, and the data might be of value in tailoring frac treatments. But I don't make those decisions, what we are doing is producing a lot of oil, and in the spirit of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", I doubt any company is going to be in a rush to spend the extra money to acquire that sort of data, especially in a depressed oil market.
So, not to be holding out. After all, geology and geosteering are what I do when working close to home.
But, yes, I can think of another unconventional resource which may prove as consistent as the Bakken, as yet untapped to my knowledge, and as such, unproven. From what i have seen of that one, the hydrocarbon fluorescence in samples, the production would be skewed toward condensate and gas/NGLs. (Before I disclose that one, though, I want a very small percentage override, or a compensation package that would ensure a significantly more comfortable retirement.)