Measure EUR in Months, Not Years

Here’s a scenario I’ve seen play out more times than I can count. An engineering team changes a completion design. Maybe they adjust the frac spacing, switch the fluid system, do something different with the perforating. They believe it’s going to perform better. Management signs off. They drill the well, complete it, bring it online, and then everybody waits.

And waits. And waits.

A year goes by. Maybe two. Somebody finally pulls the production data, compares it to the old type curve, and says, “Yeah, it looks like that worked.” By that time, the team has drilled thirty more wells using the old design because nobody could prove the new one was better fast enough to change the program. The learning was there. It just showed up too late to matter.

Robert Wichert is not interested in waiting a year or two to find out if something worked. And neither am I.

What changes when you can prove a design improvement in months instead of years, and you’ve got a play with three or four hundred wells waiting to benefit from it?

The Line That Changed the Conversation

Robert said something on Wisdom at the Wellhead that I think is one of the most important ideas in the whole episode. He was talking about customizing completions, understanding the rock better, getting more cores, and then comparing actual production against the projected decline curve. And then he said this: if we can demonstrate that we’ve changed something and we can measure it within months instead of a year or two, that’s really powerful if you’ve got a play that could be three or four hundred wells.

I want to unpack that because I think most people hear it and nod without really thinking about what it means for their capital.

The Capital Math That Nobody Talks About

When you can prove a completion improvement in months, you don’t just learn faster. You redeploy capital faster. Instead of spending two years worth of drilling budget on the old design while you wait to find out if the new one works, you spend a few months, confirm the improvement, and pivot the rest of the program. Every well you drill after that confirmation benefits from what you learned. Every dollar you spend after that confirmation is smarter than the dollar you spent before it.

Now scale that across three or four hundred wells. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a completely different outcome for the entire play.

I’ve been a petroleum engineer for a long time, and one of the most frustrating things in this business is watching good ideas die because the proof came too late. The budget was already allocated. The drilling program was already set. The team had already moved on to the next project. By the time the data confirmed what the engineer suspected all along, the window to act on it had closed. That’s not a failure of engineering. It’s a failure of speed.

Why This Used to Be Impossible and Isn’t Anymore

Robert explained the old problem clearly. A lot of the time, operators base their decline curves on wells that were completed in the 1970s or 1980s. And what did they do back then? They just perforated and walked away. The economics for the next well were built on assumptions from a completely different era of completions technology. So of course the projected EUR was conservative. The inputs were thirty or forty years old.

What’s different now is the measurement. When you’re measuring production daily, and you’ve got that data flowing into a system you trust, you can compare actual versus projected almost immediately. You can see within the first few months whether you’re beating the curve. And if you are, you can start rotating that improvement into your estimated ultimate recovery for the next well before you’ve even finished analyzing the first one.

Robert used the word “rotate” on the podcast, and I think that’s exactly right. It’s not a one-time correction. It’s a rotation. Each well teaches you something. Each lesson tightens the next projection. And each tighter projection means better capital decisions on the next well in line.

The Operator Who Learns Faster Wins

Here’s what it comes down to. Two operators are working the same play. Same geology. Same service companies available. Same rig market. One of them drills a well with a new completion design and finds out eighteen months later that it added 15% to EUR. The other one drills the same design change and knows within four months. By the time Operator A is confirming his results, Operator B has already drilled twenty wells with the improved design and is working on the next iteration.

That gap doesn’t close. It widens. Every cycle of learning that Operator B completes while Operator A is still waiting for data puts more distance between them. Same acreage. Same rock. Completely different outcomes. The difference is speed of learning, and speed of learning is a function of how fast your data tells you the truth.

I’ve seen this play out my entire career. It’s not the operator with the best rock who wins. It’s the operator who figures out what the rock is telling him the fastest. And right now, the tools to do that exist. The question is whether you’ve set up your data to use them.

Final Thought

You can’t control the geology. You can’t control the commodity price. You can’t control what your competitors do. But you can control how fast you learn from what the reservoir is telling you. And in a play with hundreds of wells ahead of you, the value of learning faster isn’t incremental. It’s the whole game.

Measure EUR in months. Not because the technology is impressive. Because the capital you save and the barrels you gain by learning faster will be the difference between a good program and a great one.

When Robert Wichert talks about measuring results in months instead of years, he’s not speaking theoretically. He’s describing the operating model Cougar Energy was designed around from the start. Hear the full conversation on Wisdom at the Wellhead.