I can’t quote any actual statistics, but many, many wells are permitted and never drilled. When a Company has a drilling rig under contract at $50,000 per day, they cannot afford to ever have any standby time. And since it is impossible to know ahead of time which areas are going to work out and which are not, they must have plenty of locations permitted so they will always have someplace to move to. If it didn’t take so long to get a permit, it wouldn’t be necessary to permit so many ahead of time. But because it does, Companies have to permit more wells than necessary, which in turn slows down the process even further. OK, rant over…
In this case, it appears that these wells were permitted by Continental within the last year, so I’d say there is at least some recent interest on their part. However, given the overall state of the industry, everybody is slowing down.