At Lower Costs Elevates Eagle Ford By Al Pickett Special Correspondent Efficiency is the name of the game these days in South Texas' Eagle Ford Shale. That includes drilling wells faster, slashing project cycle times, boosting completion efficiencies and optimizing production operations. Pioneer Natural Resources Inc., one of a number of companies going strong in the Eagle Ford despite slumping commodity prices, has taken a number of steps to improve efficiencies and continues to experiment with new techniques such as dissolvable plugs to speed completions, reports Ken Sheffield, executive vice president of South Texas operations. The results of those efforts have encouraged Pioneer to the point that it has expressed plans to add rigs in its Eagle Ford operations in 2016 after the company cut back from eight in 2014 to six rigs this year. "We plan to continue running six rigs through the end of the year, but we already have announced publicly that we are looking to increase that back to eight rigs in 2016," he states. "Our company has good hedges in place for 2015 and 2016. We have a strong balance sheet, and these Eagle Ford horizontal wells generate good returns." OCTOBER 2015 65