TULSA, Okla. -- Midstates Petroleum, which went public in April of 2012 and later that year bought 82,000 acres in the Mississippi Lime from Eagle Energy for $650 million, has seen great growth since it entered the play.

“The first quarter that we operated at 7,200 BOE per day, and we finished the third quarter of 2013 with an average rate of 14,364 BOE per day, and even though we haven’t released it yet, our fourth quarter numbers grow even higher,” Tom Thiele, Midstates’ vice president, Midcontinent, told attendees at Hart Energy’s DUG Midcontinent conference in March.

Last year, the Houston-based company acquired 130,000 acres in the Panhandle from Panther Petroleum last year, expanding its footprint in the Midcontinent.

The company’s returns are solid. Forty-four percent of the company’s wells have come on production with an initial estimated ultimate recovery (EUR) in excess of 500 BOE per day, and 12% of the wells have averaged 1,583 BOE per day.

Images courtesy of Midstates Petroleum, www.midstatespetroleum.com.

Thiele credited Midstates’ use of 3D seismic over vertical well control for better completions and thus higher EURs and initial rates of return.

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Image 1 shows two good wells, drilled and completed using vertical well control. They both lie in a porosity zone. “This is where you’re going to get your best EURs and IPs,” Thiele said.

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Image 2 shows a new well plan. “It seems relatively straightforward, we’re just going to follow the dip and we’re going to lay it in the porosity zone between two existing wells,” Thiele said. “However, this is an actual well, one that we’re not proud of, one that has a poor EUR, it had a poor IP, and significant water production problems.”

So what happened? As it turned out, not everything was as it seemed.

“As we were drilling in porosity, we suddenly drilled out of porosity going right to left, and we hit a fault,” Thiele said. “And then we continued to drill with no porosity, and we hit another fault. And then we continued to drill. We had no returns, we were drilling dry, we didn’t know whether to turn the well up or down, and we eventually gave up, overspent the project, and made a completion, just a poor completion.”

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The company turned to 3-D seismic and found there was a graben in the rock they had not anticipated. The well they had drilled was actually too shallow. Image 4 shows the geological makeup of the drilling area using 3D seismic.

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The next time Midstates drilled in the area, the company anticipated dealing with lost circulation in the faults. “Now we knew that the graben existed, and we knew that the dip wasn’t the way it appeared with vertical well control, and we ended up with a good well that had a completion planned around the existence of the faults and the graben.” The new plan is illustrated in Image 5.

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The extra work has paid off, according to Thiele. “This is an above-average EUR and IP. This is where we think we’re making a difference with the wells in the Miss today,” he said.

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