Comstock: Monster Western Haynesville Wildcats Cost $30MM-plus

Comstock Resources has confirmed its prolific, super-deep, super-high-pressure, far western Haynesville Shale 2-mile-plus wildcat wells cost more than $30 million to drill and complete.

The latest well’s cost was some $2,814/ft for the 11,405-ft lateral, the operator reported in an investor call Oct. 31. Industry rumors this past spring suggested well costs of between $30 million and $40 million at Hart Energy’s DUG GAS+ Conference & Expo in Shreveport.

By comparison, Comstock’s 16-year old traditional Haynesville Shale wells in northwestern Louisiana—where depth is some 10,000 ft to 12,000 ft— cost $642/ft to drill and $776/ft to complete, it reported in the call.

The gas pureplay E&P has 13 of the Bossier- and Haynesville-landed wildcats online to date at up to 19,000 vertical ft in Robertson and Leon counties, Texas, north of Houston.

The 13th well is on flowback currently and five more are expected to be online in this and the next quarter, executives told investors.

The wildcat play’s newest well’s D&C figure is lower than the new play’s shorter laterals’ per-foot cost, said Dan Harrison, Comstock COO.

“Anytime you have an 11,000- to 12,000-foot lateral, it's going to generate a little bit better cost per foot and vice versa: If you're at an 8,500- to 9,000-foot lateral, it's going to be a little bit higher cost per foot,” Harrison said.

Steep production

Production has been enormous, though. Including five wells made by fellow wildcatter Aethon Energy, 17 are in Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) production data to date.

Online between 29 months and five months through August, the 17 wells have surfaced 143 Bcf from production averaging 20.4 MMcf/d, including from the oldest wells, according to RRC data.

Comstock’s play opener, Circle M #1H, made 17.4 Bcf in its first 29 months through August, averaging more than 2.2 Bcf per 1,000 lateral ft to date.

The operator’s Ingram Martin A #1H, the newest well for which the RRC has published production data, made 4 Bcf in its first five months online.

The newest well, Hodges RLT #1H, in Leon County, is flowing back currently and reached total depth (TD)—both vertical and lateral—in 51 days, down from the earliest wells’ 70 to 80 days to reach TD, Comstock reported in the call.

“This was the fastest one we've drilled to TD,” Harrison said.

The temperature can reach 450 F, according to vertical Bossier explorers’ logs in the early 2000s.

Harrison said, “We've gotten a lot better at handling the bottomhole temperature, so that's really not an issue.”

Rather, what’s adding drill days is minor faulting “here and there. So there are some geohazards in certain places when you can't drill across and [you] have to stop.

“That’s really the only driver [of drill days] there.”

Comstock has 3D data across its leasehold, he added. “So we have a pretty good picture of what it looks like.”

While it has 453,881 net acres in the play, it’s looking at 10,000-ft laterals for the time being.

The longest lateral is the Campbell EO B #2H’s 12,763 ft in Robertson County. It came online in January 2023 and produced 9.4 Bcf in its first 18 months, according to RRC data.

Comstock’s shortest lateral—7,764 ft in the Ingram Martin A #1H—came online in April, also in Robertson County. It produced 4 Bcf through August.

“We’re not having any issues drilling these 10,000- and 11,500-foot laterals. It's just limited by, like I said, geohazards or other factors,” Harrison said.

‘Chasing a car and catching it’

Jay Allison, Comstock’s chairman and COO, said, “We have secured [more than] 450,000 net acres in the western Haynesville and have drilled 18 wells over an area of 26 miles to give birth to a major natural gas field close to the LNG demand corridor, which could potentially add decades of additional drilling inventory.

“I told someone that it is like a dog chasing a car and catching it. That's what we did in the western Haynesville.”

He added that the $2,814-per-lateral-ft D&C cost is for a single-well pad.

Four new wells in this and the next quarter will be on a pair of two-well pads, which two frac spreads are completing currently.

The wildcat program hasn’t been cheap but “the holy grail is inventory,” Allison said.

“We were able to take an old gas field, which is now … the western Haynesville.

“We went deeper just like we did in the core of the Haynesville-Bossier [in Louisiana]. And we've figured out that technically we can drill and complete these wells and make it competitive with our core.”

Comstock’s 17-bank syndicate reaffirmed its $2 billion borrowing base “and gave us unanimous approval … to loosen the leverage,” Allison said.

That’s “17 banks looking at us. And they look at the whole company and they look at the future and that's why we had unanimous approval.”

Natural gas prices are poor. But “you have to weather this storm in order to be there when the bright light and sun comes back out. And we're more than well positioned to do that,” Allison said.

Comstock has three of its five rigs currently drilling in the Louisiana position.

Allison said any of the five are capable of drilling the super-deep western Haynesville position.

“So even if they're drilling in the legacy area, we want them to be qualified if you need to move them over to the western Haynesville.”

Leasing continues just to “clean up around where you’ve already leased and if there's anything else that you need to add to expand a little bit,” he added.

Some 90% of it is done, though. “Those days are behind us. And the reason we were successful in acquiring that acreage was just because gas was low.

“Nobody was out there doing it.”