Pullback In US Fracking Sand Use Pressures Producers

Pullback In US Fracking Sand Use Pressures Producers
US shale oil companies are pulling back on the amount of sand they use to hydraulically fracture new wells.

In the Denver-Julesburg Basin of Colorado, Anadarko said the new well designs have increased oil and gas production by as much as 35 percent. It is "no secret we have experimented with less sand out there," Bradley Holly, Anadarko's head of U.S. onshore exploration and production, told analysts last month.

Analysts and frack sand providers continue to forecast an overall rise in sand consumption as more wells are drilled and completed. Smart Sand last week blamed its decline on operational and logistics problems.

"The cases where people were scaling back usage, that was probably due to logistics problems," Duane Scardino, Hi Crush's corporate development manager, said in an interview this week. "It's hard for me to imagine what would be more cost effective than frack sand."

Still, Atlas Consulting's Salazar said of the major U.S. shale basins, only two - Haynesville and Eagle Ford - are pumping in more sand per well.

(Reporting by Arathy S Nair and Nivedita Bhattacharjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Gary McWilliams)


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