In closing, as I pointed out before, I am a petroleum engineer. Designing frack jobs is what we did in college in the 1970s and the 1980s. Everybody wants to treat this as new technology. Pumping fracks have existed.... Thousands and thousands of fracks have been pumped all over North America, all over the world.
In the United States we pump them on a regular basis, especially in tighter rock in the central United States. It's not a new technology by any stretch of the imagination. We would call these “water fracks“, high-volume water with sand. The water breaks open the formation, and the sand pops the formation. You create flow channels, and the sand holds the flow channels open. They are limited in extent; because of the energy you pump they tend to be somewhat localized.
On a pad right now, we've limited our footprint. Pad drilling is what we've gone through in Horn River, where one pad can drain 2,000 acres. We drill 16 wells or so on a pad and limit the size of the footprint we have in the areas. You space those wells. Right now, depending on the well pad, they're about 300 or 400 metres apart to get connectivity between wells. It's not as if the fracks go on forever. They're in a small, limited area, and that's how you effectively drain an area.
I have something about the well bores we've talked about before. They are at depth. These wells will be drilled to 3,000 metres at depth and then horizontals are laid out flat at a 90-degree angle into the reservoir. They're cased all the way down and they're pressure-tested. They have integrity. We would ensure that. We would not pump a frack job if they didn't. A lot of things industry does are common practice that we don't go out and tell people we do. It would be imprudent for us to do anything but do the best we can and get these assets developed and try to improve the communities we're in.
That's it.