While the technology for horizontal drilling has been around for at least two decades, it did not become a profitable option for oil and gas companies until a few years ago.
Now nearly every rig drilling in the Haynesville Shale is a horizontal well. They allow more pipe to be exposed to the rock, increasing the amount of natural gas that can be pumped out.
Horizontal drilling became useful 20 years ago during Austin Chalk oil play in Pearsall, Texas, said Ray Lasseigne, president of TMR Exploration in Bossier City. "It's used for drilling oil and gas reservoirs. It's especially useful in naturally fractured reservoirs, carbonate or limestone."
The process starts with a rig and a crew of about four drill hands and a driller, who begin putting thousands of feet of pipe into the ground.
The drill hands put the pipe into the well bore and connect each section together, while the driller controls the drill bit.
"There really ain't a whole lot to it," said drilling supervisor Tom Autry, who works on the Trinidad 104 rig in south Caddo Parish. "It's simple operations."
The Trinidad 104 is a Chesapeake Energy Corp. rig drilling into the Haynesville Shale.
Once the hole gets to a certain depth, Autry said, a device called a "mud motor" starts to drill at a different angle to curve the pipe into a horizontal position.
All the drilling is controlled from the confines of a control room that sits atop the drill platform. From there, the directional driller can turn the motor in the direction needed to curve the pipe.
Autry said the steel pipes are flexible and can bend easily without breaking.
Lasseigne compared the pipe's flexibility to a clothes hanger. If a hanger is untwisted at the top and straightened out, he said, it can wiggle and easily bend into a circle.
It takes 500 to 600 feet for the drill to make a 90-degree turn.
Drilling horizontally allows the pipe to be exposed to up to 10 times more rock than vertical drilling.
Once the hole is drilled and new pipes are inserted, the fracturing and perforation process begins.
Perforating means punching holes in the pipe. Fracturing is opening the rock to release the natural gas so it can flow into the perforations.
A mixture of water and sand is sent through the pipe at high pressure, causing it to flow through the holes in the pipe and fracture the rock. The water flows back into and out of the pipe, leaving the sand to keep the fractures open and allow the gas to seep into the pipe.
Production valves, storage tanks and access pipelines connected to larger transmission systems are installed so the natural gas can be transported to the marketplace.
The cost of each well is about $6 million to $8 million.