Prairie Operating has had a busy year already, and it’s only April.

In late March the company closed its $602.75 million acquisition of assets in the Denver-Julesburg (D-J) Basin from Bayswater Exploration and Production. Last week it started work on an 11-well drilling program in Weld County, Colorado.

The program is on land that was already part of Prairie’s portfolio, company President Gary Hanna said in an interview with Hart Energy.

“We’ve already spud the first well and are in the process of drilling that,” he said. “It’s a pretty exciting project up there.”

The wells are two-mile horizontal wells, Hanna said. Prairie is using Precision Drilling’s E-461 rig for the work.

“It's a Super Triple 1200, really custom made for what we're doing out here in this kind of drilling in the D-J,” he said. “What's so super about it is it's right-sized, it's got all the latest technology on it [and] it's a multi-powered electric unit, so it can run on diesel, it can run on CNG, or it can run fully electrified.”

The well area isn’t electrified so Prairie is using CNG to power the rig.

“We don't really burn much diesel at all, if any, just trying to cut our carbon footprint down,” Hanna said. “It’s quite effective. When you run the full electrification, we'll have a big giant lithium battery, honestly. It's about the size of a tractor-trailer truck. It backs you up in case you need to switch over to CNG if you lose power for some reason, just as a safety measure.”

The rig is also a full walking unit, Hanna said, which speeds up the drilling process.

"It runs full x-y axis, so it'll crawl on its own,” he said. “We drill these back-to-back, so we'll set our surface and we'll just go one to the next to the next to the next to the next to the next. We’ve done really well with that rig.” 

Hanna said Prairie expects to drill the 11 wells in about 50 days. The process has changed a little in his 45 years in the business.

“I remember the beginning of drilling horizontal wells, and it wasn’t an exact science,” he said. “We drilled a lot directionally offshore, and, using kind of 3D modeling, it was very exploratory-ish.”

Now drillers use advanced 3D technology and artificial intelligence (AI).

“We have 3D shot over our entire area, but we use it primarily to design our wellbore path,” he said. “We load that in a computer and we use the 3D to steer in live time.”

The rig always has a person at the controls, working with a new AI function that assists the operator.

“As a safety factor, we keep somebody on there manually running it,” he said. "It's an insurance policy if nothing else. We're not quite ready to go fully automated. Our guys are specialists out there. It's a high-dollar operation. You want to get it right the first time.”

Meanwhile, Prairie is evaluating its new assets from Bayswater, Hanna said.

“Bayswater was an excellent operator,” he said. “It’s a luxury to follow behind guys that are quality operators. It’s certainly nice to not come in and say there’s so much here to fix.”

Several Bayswater locations already have the needed permits, Hanna said.

“We’ll try to get those into schedules,” he said. “We’re not going to run down the hill too quickly, but we’ve got some things in the near immediate future we can execute.”

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