Neil Mehta : And then the follow-up is congrats on getting the Al Hosn gas expansion on this year. Just would love any perspective or thoughts on your Middle East business and how we should think about the incremental cash flow associated with the asset that just came online?
Vicki Hollub : The Al Hosn project getting to the 1.45 Bcf a day had very little capital is definitely a good project for us. And with — just having gotten that back on, we expect that the certainly, the production looking good towards the rest of this year from Al Hosn and also the fact that we were in Oman able to get an exploration well that was record setting for us online and to production in less than a month was another good sign for healthy production coming out of the Middle East. We do have incremental opportunities in Oman for additional wells that are similar to that in Block 65. So — and this year, this past year, in Safah field on the North Oman. We’ve had production records there, and that’s a field that’s been in operation for over 40 years.
So we’re still finding new things to do there. And also, when I talk about innovation and subsurface modeling and with — and Richard brought up the guys that are working really hard base maintenance and base production. I want to mention, too, that there’s been quite a bit of innovation coming out of Oman as well, One being a process called oxygetting, where we go into — you can do it in new wells or existing wells to go in and get through the formation and with proprietary process we use there and get incremental production, and that’s part of the reason that we were able to achieve record production from that area this year. So a lot of good things happening in our Middle East operations, and we’re as I mentioned in my script, focused on 3 countries, and we feel like it is best not to be spread over a lot of countries, but to we like the fact that we are here in the U.S. and countries internationally, and we’ll focus on being the best we could be in those areas and eliminate or minimize distractions from anything else.
Operator: The next question comes from Neal Dingmann with Truist.
Neal Dingmann : My question is on the Gulf of Mexico. Your production and incremental operations and continue to look quite solid. I was just wondering how would you classify just current opportunities today in the Gulf? And could we see any notable change in activity there in the coming quarters?
Vicki Hollub: I would say that I have — my thoughts about the Gulf of Mexico have actually changed a bit over the past year. Originally, when we made the acquisition, our plan was just to keep production flat and use the cash flow to invest elsewhere. I do believe now, again, based on the technical excellence of our teams working at and the fact that artificial intelligence, I believe, is going to be — advanced data analytics, I believe, is going to be a game changer for the Gulf of Mexico. And I believe our team has the capability and expertise to optimize the use of those tools. So I think that not this year or next year, but I do believe that looking forward in the next three to five years, the Gulf of Mexico could become more of a growth area for us rather than just a cash generator.
Neal Dingmann : I agree. I like the opportunities there. And then secondly, just — you talked around this already, but maybe just a little more detail on your slide now on the DJ, maybe about just well spacing and completion design there. I’m just wondering, have your thoughts — you guys have been ramping that up. And I’m just wondering, as you have been ramping up, have the thoughts on space or completion design has changed going forward? I think like in recent months, I believe Gaddis and other pads are what about 12-well spacing. So I’m just wondering if there’s any thoughts to change any of that?
Richard Jackson : Yes. Great. This is Richard. I’ll try to take a few pieces of that. I mean very excited about the DJ, like I described, but the new well performance in the base. But I would say consistent with really what we’ve done across our reservoir positions and especially in the unconventional. It really starts with the challenge on the subsurface in terms of all the things you described, spacing, how many wells per DSU. And I think the teams continue to look at those opportunities. And as we noted, really thinking about less, I think moving from 18 to 8 to 12 wells per section allows us to deliver the same EOR for less cost. And I think just like we’ve done in the Permian, that’s the right recipe. We have been able to use completions and really frac intensity to kind of turn up the lever to help capture those reserves without having to drill additional wells.
So we’ve gone up to 1,500 pounds per foot, which is up about 30%, I think from our prior designs. As we think about spacing and inventory, the thing I would say is not every drill spacing unit is the same. So the geology changes, the development sequencing changes. And so there’ll be areas where that may be different. I think just to kind of contrast a little bit, we highlighted the performing DSUs in the Delaware Basin, those are actually opportunities where we added wells per section. And we were able to do that again by looking at the unique kind of attributes of that drill spacing unit against the reservoir. And we’re cautious with that, but we’ve been able to have real success, both horizontally and vertically adding those wells where it’s warranted.
But just the last maybe a couple of points in the DJ, again. It’s sort of a holistic design that the operation’s team’s put together. They have done a lot to reduce time to peak production. So eliminating those surface constraints where they can really allow those wells to optimally flow. And then as Vicki described, longer term, these wells go from gas lift to plunger lift and being able to use analytics to not only be quicker in terms of our optimization, but actually predict failure mechanism so that we can deploy operations teams quicker. These are the type of things that just really excite us about how our teams approach really adding production at the right cost.
