PostRock to refine Kansas frac treatments

By OGJ editors
HOUSTON, Nov. 17 -- A recapitalized PostRock Energy Corp., Oklahoma City, plans to convert to more customized frac treatments on its Southeast Kansas coalbed methane properties.

The company is also attempting to sell most of its Marcellus shale assets in West Virginia. It plans to disclose its 2011 drilling program in January.

Production is steady at 54 MMcfd of gas equivalent. The company drilled and completed 27 wells and returned 42 to production in the Cherokee basin in the quarter ended Sept. 30, bringing year-to-date totals to 141 and 232, respectively.

A fair number of wells completed in this year’s first two quarters didn’t achieve peak production rate as expected. Detailed engineering studies of the underperformance indicate that the “historical approach to zonal fracture treatments is too standardized, and not as transferrable across the basin as we once believed,” PostRock said last week.

“On future development projects, custom fracture treatments tailored to zone and region will be employed to maximize the effectiveness of each completion stage,” the company said.

PostRock owns and operates more than 2,800 wells and nearly 2,200 miles of gas gathering lines in the basin in Kansas and Oklahoma (OGJ, Nov. 1, 2010, p. 62). It also owns a 1,100 miles of interstate gas pipelines serving parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri.