Cory Richards, CEO of PT Petroleum, sat down with Jessica Morales at Hart Energy’s recently held DUG Permian conference and exhibition in Fort Worth, Texas, to discuss preliminary results from the Wolfcamp C discovery in the Trinity Project. He also spoke about technology advancements and explained why he believes it’s important to interact with other operators in any given area.

Hart Energy: You recently released preliminary results from your Wolfcamp C discovery in the Trinity Project and it’s believed this discovery is transformational for the Trinity Project, and for a large portion of the southern Midland Basin. Why?

Cory Richards: Well several reasons, number one it’s the farthest [and] lowest Wolfcamp C well, that is a prolific, top tier well. That’s significant for several reasons. One of the big reasons, is that it is south of the big lake fault and a lot of companies denote acreage there [as not being] commercial. But that’s really been proven incorrect.

As the advancements in technology and improvement of landing zone continues, we find better and better ways to complete some of these reservoirs that were previously uncommercial. In large part, this zone is untested in this whole area. We actually discovered it by drilling a deeper Ellenburger salt water disposal well. We are intensely focused on gathering data and analyzing that data. We mudlogged that well and ran a complete openhole logging suite on the well, even though it was completely independent of making it into a commercial disposal well. When we did that we noted a tremendous mudlog show, gas and sample fluorescents in cut.

We got the openhole logs and had those processed into a shale log, which is a Halliburton product geared toward unconventional reservoirs. It showed very comparable reservoir characteristics of this lower Wolfcamp C zone to the Wolfcamp A and B that were already productive on the block. We correlated from that well all the way to where we drilled the 6091 discovery well which was more than 10 miles away. We found very consistent petrophysical characteristics. We drilled the well there and proved that we had outstanding reservoir quality and have since drilled three additional delineation wells in the Wolfcamp C and our offset operator is currently drilling one as well. That coupled with a lot of activity further north in Upton and Reagan counties by Parsely Energy, Callon, Earthstone, Pioneer and a number of others have all targeted a stratigraphically lower interval than what has been drilled before in the Wolfcamp C. It’s easy to get confused when you pull up public records and see Wolfcamp C. If it’s before 2017, it’s probably in the upper landing zone and the better wells—including ours—are in the lower loading zone.

HE: What are your company’s plans for the play going forward?

Richards: We are still in the infancy of this play; our block is quite large with 64,000 contiguous acres. We have done a tremendous job improving results over the original operator and have proven that the rock is in fact commercial there in three distinct formations and there is a lot more to be done.

We are probably nearing the point to try to hand off the property to a larger operator. We feel like we have set the table and it’s ready for full-scale development with more capital, more personnel and it’s truly going to be a legacy property.

HE: Do you see an increase in potential to increase output in the Wolfcamp considering the U.S. Geographical Survey (USGS) has confirmed there’s a lot of oil, gas and NGL to be had?

Richards: I believe so. The Permian Basin is marked by constant evolution and the USGS study that came out earmarked about 20 billion barrels recoverable by current technology. That was in November 2016, and even since then, technology has advanced quite a bit. I found that estimate to be conservative at that time, but even more so now. I think it is going to be eclipsed in a pretty short order. They will continue to revise that estimate up. This newer and lower Wolfcamp C zone that ourselves and others are exploiting probably was not included in that because it really wasn’t being completed at the time the study was done.

HE: Can you give us your thoughts about the importance of interacting with other operators to develop best practices in a given area?

Richards: We have always been in favor of doing that. Even though we are a private company and quite small by comparison to others, we pride ourselves on being top-notch technical students. We analyze existing data as much as we can. The old measure it twice, cut once adage comes into play because the wells are quite expensive to drill. You have to extract as much understanding as you can from the existing data— whether that is seismic, well log control or any number of sources—before you decide where and when to drill. We are a big proponent of trading data with other operators and believe firmly that that helps accelerate the pace of progress with technology.