Eight months or so ago Novi did a big study on parent/child interference in the Midland Basin and how severely this interference degraded future well performance and the quality of remaining Tier 1 and 2 drilling locations. Degradation is just another term for pressure depletion or to get to the point...depletion. I wrote about it here on OSC and then followed it up with a post on how to predict future degradation and rates of depletion. It's of course a mistake to believe pressure depletion will plateau and well productivity will stop getting worse. That post about predicting pressure depletion is still up, by the way.

Well productivity (EURs) in the Midland Basin on a normalized, per lateral foot basis is deteriorating quickly now in all three of the major producing benches in the Basin. That won't get better, it will get worse.

Production, however, bounces around and sometimes appears to be plateauing but that is entirely a function of Exxon and Diamondback's three-mile lateral campaign. Longer laterals masks over depletion factors, temporarily.

The Midland Basin is jam packed full of HZ laterals, many on very close spacing.

If folks truly understood the legal difficulty, and costs (Exxon's merger with Pioneer cost $4.6 MM per drillable location) to find room for three-mile laterals in say Midland County, they'd realize it cannot go on much longer. There is simply no room. When the longer lateral fad is over and the basin completely drilled out (<4 years) production will fall like a rock.

It's like getting old; just because you think it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it's not going to happen. One day you wake up and holy Schnikes, all of a sudden you are REAL old. You run more miles in the morning trying to stay young and defer the ultimate outcome as long as possible, but all that running just makes you age faster.