Why today’s unconventional completions operations are inefficient—and how continuity is the answer

Across high-cycle developments, a significant portion of time is traditionally spent setting up equipment, reconfiguring layouts, aligning crews, and waiting for the next step in sequence. This time multiplies across stages and wells, reducing utilization of the assets deployed on location.

As projects expand to longer laterals and multi-well pads, these time intervals increase in frequency, widening the gap between available pumping capacity and the output delivered. Similarly, inefficiency and waste expand.

Where NPT originates
Wellsite performance data reveals that most delays arise not from subsurface conditions but from the surface workflow. This is a surprising situation, given the complex geology of unconventional reservoirs. Common sources of nonproductive time (NPT) include

• Equipment systems designed for discrete tasks, requiring reconfiguration between stages
• Sequenced workflows in which one activity must be completed before the next can begin
• Manual intervention during pressure-critical operations
• Separate control systems operated by different vendors
• Configuration differences between wells or pads.
• Each of these introduces a point where the operation must halt temporarily to adjust, verify, or hand over control. And these pauses are embedded in the structure of the completion workflow.

As operations scale, the number of these interaction points increases. Adding equipment, service providers, and stages introduces further dependencies—expanding the number of elements that must be aligned before sanding can continue.

In this model, regardless of how well individual components perform, the overall operation remains constrained by how components connect and interact.

Efficiency is increasing, but slowly
Over the past two decades the oil and gas industry has implemented technical advancements that have delivered measurable improvements in wellsite operations. Automation has accelerated some task sequences and reduced manual intervention. Equipment capability has increased across fleets.

A comparable shift has already taken place in drilling operations, where output was traditionally tied to rig count. Nowadays, high spec rigs, automation, and intelligent downhole tools enable operators to drill longer laterals, faster, using fewer rigs. While rig counts fall, production continues to rise.

The industry has improved many elements of the unconventional completions process. Automation is becoming the norm, with a goal of continuous pumping for large-scale operations. In other ongoing efforts to reduce downtime, vendors are targeting specific aspects, such as accelerating rig-up, improving crew coordination, or shortening test processes.

Although these piecemeal developments have extended the duration of operational activity, NPT persists—embedded in how operations remain relatively unchanged in their configuration, coordination, and execution.

Are we measuring the right things?
In unconventional completions, performance is still measured using output metrics such as the number of stages completed or pumping rate achieved. While these statistics account for what happens during active operations, they fail to capture and quantify the periods of inefficiency and waste between them.

As long as completions operations incorporate multiple configuration changes, control interfaces, and sequential dependencies, interruptions will remain firmly entrenched in the workflow. Yes, reducing the duration of each interruption lowers its overall impact. But only by eliminating the need for these interruptions will the outcome change fundamentally.

Could continuous activity be the new metric?
Operations that sustain high levels of continuous activity share common characteristics:

• Equipment remains configured across multiple stages
• Flow paths are maintained without repeated disconnection and reconnection
• Control systems coordinate activity across the full operation
• Workflow structure reduces dependency between parallel activities

These characteristics change how often the operation pauses, rather than how quickly it can recover once paused.

Field deployments using such integrated surface configurations are achieving continuous high-rate, sand-laden pumping, racking up increases in total pumping hours per month.

For example, using TechnipFMC’s iComplete® high-performance surface pressure containment ecosystem, an operator increased pumping hours from approximately 405 hours per month before deployment to 594 and 635 hours during the first two months of operation.

These sustained higher operating rates are directly linked to the removal of interruption points across the workflow.

A new focus for the future
The drilling side has proved that it’s the technological ecosystem that drives sustainable production growth. This shift fundamentally changed how the industry thinks about efficiency.

Now it’s time for completions methodologies to undergo a similar shift, evaluating performance based on how much truly continuous, sustained work that a wellsite ecosystem can deliver over a deployment.

Implications for performance
Reducing the opportunities for NPT increases the proportion of time spent delivering useful work. This improves

• Utilization of pumping equipment and crews
• Throughput across pads and development programs
• Scheduling reliability and coordination between wells
• Time to first oil and gas

Conversely to how the negative effects of workflow interruptions are amplified across multi-well developments, the positive gains from deploying an ecosystem of integrated surface configurations build from stage to pad to field and are particularly impactful at remote locations.

A closing thought
Improvements within individual tasks may increase efficiency during execution. Yet in high-cycle completions operations, adopting overall system integration promises to yield higher level performance gains. By changing how the operation is structured, we can design and implement ecosystems that eliminate any need to stop.