Going big with 'Cube Supersized' fracking operations

Bloomberg:

In the scrublands of West Texas there’s an oil-drilling operation like few that have come before.

Encana Corp.’s RAB Davidson well pad is so mammoth, the explorer speaks of it in military terms, describing its efforts here as an occupation. More than 1 million pounds of drilling rigs, bulldozers, tanker trucks and other equipment spread out over a dusty 16-acre expanse. As of November, the 19 wells here collectively pumped almost 20,000 barrels of crude per day, according to company reports.

Encana calls this “cube development," and it may be the supersized future of U.S. fracking, says Gabriel Daoud, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst who visited Davidson last year. The technique is designed to tap the multiple layers of petroleum-soaked rock here in Texas’ Permian shale basin all at once, rather than the one-or-two-well, one-layer-at-a-time approach of the past.
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With the new technique, Encana and other companies are pushing beyond the drilling patterns that dominated during the early, exploratory phases of the shale revolution. Now, operators are assembling projects with a dozen or more well bores that touch multiple underground layers of the Permian and other shale plays simultaneously, tapping the entire 3-D “cube" beneath a producer’s acreage.
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The operations aren’t cheap. A project the size of RAB Davidson may have cost Encana $120 million, according to JPMorgan’s Daoud. Included in the calculations are the cost of the extra wells, bigger tank batteries, added pumping power, extended pipeline networks and additional labor required in cube development, among other expenses.

Proponents, though, say it saves money in the long run, thanks to economies of scale and improved well productivity rates. One driller bragged about employing several drilling contractors on the same pad and leveraging one’s price against the other, the analyst recalled.
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There is much more and many operators see the technique as risky.  The huge production potential could also be limited by demand for oil.  It is that productive.