Drillers have been stepping up their use of horseshoe wells in the past 18 months, helping improve extraction from tight lease spaces and lower costs by millions per well.
“The stuff has ballooned in particular since the start of the year,” said John Huycke, a Denver-based drilling consultant and the owner of Udriller.com, which chronicles U-lateral activity. “There have been as many wells [drilled] since the beginning of the year since they started in 2019, so folks are really getting after it.”
Udriller’s data shows more than 60 U-lateral wells—also called paperclips and switchbacks—have been drilled this year, up from less than 10 in 2022. Among the drilled are E&Ps Matador Resources, Vital Energy and Comstock Resources. It’s still a tiny percentage of the thousands of wells drilled each year.
The energy data firm TGS ASA has also been tracking horseshoes, pioneered by Shell in the Delaware Basin in 2019.
“Over 30 U-turn wells have been drilled across the Permian in the last six years, with operators such as Matador and Vital Energy citing cost savings averaging $3 million per horseshoe well,” TGS analyst Andrew Stearns wrote in the TGS weekly spotlight in May.
TGS said the primary locations for horseshoes have been the Spraberry Formation in the southwest Midland Basin, the Wolfcamp across the lower portion of the Delaware Basin, and Bone Spring on the Texas-New Mexico border in Loving and Lea counties.
Stearns said operators appear to be using horseshoes in their Tier 2 and Tier 3 acreage and not in their Tier 1 fields. The lower drilling and completion costs make it a better option than two 1-mile laterals.
“If you're limited on service space, maybe you have a single section or a couple of sections that are kind of stranded,” Stearns told Hart Energy. “It helps to kind of use this strategy to use less pads, use less locations.”
That’s what prompted Comstock Resources to complete its first horseshoe this year in the Haynesville Shale. The Sebastian 11 #5 had a 9,382-ft lateral and a 31 MMcf/d IP rate, the company said in its June investor presentation.
“The Sebastian was in an area where we just converted to short laterals due to lease geometry into a single horseshoe well,” Ron Mills, Comstock’s vice president of finance and investor relations, said in an email. The company plans to drill eight horseshoes in 2025.
Neil Modeland, senior business technology development manager for Halliburton, said the horseshoes aren't any harder to drill. The decision is more about analyzing the break-evens.
“If you get stuck drilling a 1-mile lateral instead of a 2-mile lateral [because of a tight lease space],” the breakeven might jump to $55/bbl or $60/bbl from $40, he said. The horseshoe brings that number back down.
“You’re saving on surface pipe, you’re saving on your intermediate, all the cement jobs associated with that and all the time,” he said. “Now you’re getting 10,000 feet of completion for one vertical as opposed to being able to complete 5,000.”
TGS estimated that Spraberry horseshoe wells were 27% more profitable on a net present value per foot basis when compared to drilling two 1-mile laterals.
“We probably need a little bit more data” from the Wolfcamp and Bone Spring, Stearns said. “Obviously, the operators internally probably have something specific that they’re looking for.”
Leen Wiejers, senior vice president of engineering at Liberty Energy, said he doesn’t expect to see widespread use of horseshoes. He said they add nice flexibility in the right circumstances.
"I think this is a little bit more on the margins,” he said. Horseshoes “can be very handy in certain situations when you have certain land constraints—when you can get to a specific spot, why not drill an extra thousand or a couple of thousand feet this way?”