The three drilling engineer buddies I have left in the Permian don't like to talk about the Barnett because they are afraid they'll be asked to drill another one. Apparently, it's a bitch. There have been three losses of surface control incidents in the Permian drilling Barnett wells, since 2022, including one fire. It requires multiple strings of pipe and is over pressured. Frac gradients from the San Andres to the top of the Barnett run the mud density spectrum, from 10.2 lbs. per gal down to 9.3 and back up to 11.8. This is Gulf Coast kind of stuff and young hard rock guys in West Texas get nervous with wells kicking on them, then disappearing the other way before getting in their face again. It makes them skittish, like cats.

This Barnett in the Permian is essentially the same as in the Fort Worth Basin. It's also the same Barnett in the Alpine High fiasco of Apache's back in 2017-2018. Remember that? First it was going to be 4 G barrels of recoverable oil, then when they found out it was gassy, and not very oily, they estimated 18 BCF EUR's that then pooped out around 3. Investors sued and Apache disappeared in the GOM for 8 years. They're back now in the Permian....drilling U-Turn wells.

Here is a Novi map of all the Barnett wells drilled in the Permian to date. The Alpine low wells of Apache's are circled north of Balmorhea. Only about 140 so far, totaled up.

Barnett shale cooked its hydrocarbons in deep, thick sections of mudstone in each sub basin; in the Delaware it can be plus 13-14K feet TVD, the stuff over in the Midland is about 12K ft. TVD. When you look at these charts remember that both Oxy and CLR, of Bakken fame, have drilled a couple of three or four hosses in the Barnett, one of CLR's is pushing 800K BO cummprod. in 25 months. They slide over and can't replicate, however. There appear to be depositional reasons for that I won't go into. Not much of the Barnett in the Delaware is worth writing home to mama about.

Over on the west flank of the Midland Basin, and on the platform, the'yre working on it with mixed results. A lot of Barnett mudstone is of structural significance, so they are shooting 3 and 4 D seismic to find the best spots. It is not a big vast resource like the Wolfcamp, it actually looks kind of isolated to me. Real geologists will raise hell about my descriptions; write your own stuff.

In this cumulative oil vs. time chart you can see the Oxy and CLR wells reaching for the sky and how little grease the Alpine High stuff made. Everything past month 100 is a Novi guess using machine learning, out 30 years, and based on some weird economics. Enverus and Rystad both say full cycle breakevens are over $70 oil today, going to $95 in a few years, Novi says wells breakeven at $50 and make 25% ROIs. Don't ask me about that crap.

On a liquids' basis in the Midland Basin, man. Those wells decline like an anchor dropped in the open ocean. They average higher IP's and lower water cuts than shallower benches but...

If the Barnett becomes a thing it will likely be a gas thing, but I am not sure it's worth spending $75 B of pipe and export facilities on. On top, the most productive years for associated gas were 2018 and 2019. When normalized for lateral lengths stuff appears to then go downhill and 2024 wells appear to be well below average, according to Novi. Total gas production to date appears to track similar decline in other, shallower benches, or is a little better.

I'll work on this some more someday when I get some more poop. In the meantime, let's hope this works out, and the natural gas stays in America, for Americans.