Well completion
Well completion is the process of preparing a drilled wellbore to safely and efficiently produce oil or gas, including casing, cementing, and perforating.
Completion is everything that happens after a well is drilled but before it's turned over to production: running and cementing casing, perforating the target zone, sometimes fracturing the rock to improve flow, and installing the tubing and downhole equipment the well will produce through. The completion style used — cased-hole versus open-hole, single-stage versus multi-stage fracturing — has a huge effect on how much a well ultimately produces, which is why completion design keeps evolving even in mature plays.
Guests on the show describe completion techniques changing dramatically as horizontal drilling matured, moving from early open-hole designs with cement packers to cased and cemented wellbores that allow many more frac stages along the lateral, a shift that dramatically improved well performance in shale plays like the Barnett.
Heard on the show
“trying to, you know, normalize if it's a p horizontal play, you're trying to normalize for lateral length and for completion style things of that nature”
“when you you know set casing, if you make a well, then immediately you turn it over to your completion people, completion engineer, and he takes it from there”