Well Drilling & Completion Days

Drilling and completion durations reconstructed from BSEE Well Activity Reports for 217 wells across 12 Lower-Tertiary deepwater leases (10 developments) — spud-to-total-depth (drilling) and total-depth-to-final- completion-activity (completion), with per-well depth and water-depth context.
BSEE Well Activity Reports · V30 drilling/completion-days methodology · deterministic from a frozen reference

Portfolio at a glance

217
deepwater wells (WAR records)
12
lease names (10 developments)
19
federal surface leases
2000–2024
spud-year span
38 d
median drilling time
24 d
median completion time
4,130–9,525 ft
water-depth range
37,743 ft
deepest well (measured depth)
Verification · reconciled against the World Oil April 2026 article. On the 9 developments both sources cover, WED totals 19,445 D&C days vs the World Oil article's 19,940 — -495 days (-2.5%) and -8 wellbores, at or below the benchmark on every matched field. Two fields sit outside the comparison: Big Foot (3,033 d, WED-only — the article excluded it) and Buckskin (2,004 d, WO-only — identity recovered, ingest pending #842). Three developments remain under investigation. Open the field- and well-level reconciliation →

By field

Drilling days = spud date → total-depth date. Completion days = total-depth date → last completion activity. Medians are the headline figure (robust to the sidetracks and recompletions whose WAR milestones coincide on a single day); means are shown alongside. Total D&C is the summed drilling + completion days per lease; rolled up to developments (Cascade+Chinook, Jack+St Malo) it reconciles to the World Oil April 2026 article benchmark on the matched developments. The deepest borehole in the set is North Platte well 608074032001 at 37,743 ft measured / 35,115 ft TVD.

FieldWells Total D&C Drill (med)Drill (mean) Compl (med)Compl (mean) Water depth (ft)
St Malo655,6962635.31452.36,820
Big Foot383,0331231.81948.15,190
Shenandoah231,9893853.81532.75,840
Stones222,6027066.24852.09,525
Anchor151,8255154.73466.95,080
North Platte149714648.22421.15,840
Cascade91,6947198.76089.68,200
Julia91,6879689.19698.37,335
Jack81,1175881.53658.17,240
Kaskida78413779.44640.75,860
Chinook57732863.42791.28,900
Tiber2250107107.01818.04,130

How the durations are measured

Each well's milestones come from its BSEE Well Activity Reports: the spud date, the total-depth date, and the last recorded completion activity. Drilling and completion days are the calendar spans between them. Records where a milestone is missing or the span is zero (33 wells show zero drilling days, 31 show zero completion days — typically sidetracks or recompletions that open and finish an interval the same day) are kept in the population and reported as-is rather than dropped or estimated, which is why the mean sits well above the median for several fields.

Provenance

Figures are computed deterministically from one frozen, committed reference workbook, docs/…/FDAS_V30/drilling_and_completion_days.xlsx, itself derived from public BSEE Well Activity Reports under the V30 drilling/ completion-days methodology. The page is regenerated by scripts/completion/build_completion_report.py — same workbook in, byte-identical HTML out.