Supersized Well Pads Becoming All the Rage in Utica and Marcellus Shale

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From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Dave Elkin remembers in the earlier days of the Marcellus when EQT drilled three wells from a single well pad and it was considered a technological marvel. 
“The greatest thing since sliced bread,” Mr. Elkin, a senior vice president of asset optimization at EQT Corp., thought at the time. 
It was a quaint memory that contrasts sharply with the company’s and industry’s new normal: superpads — concrete platforms that can house 30 wells, maybe even 40, with long horizontal tentacles stretching underground for up to 4 miles in each direction. 
A superpad means a quarter of a billion dollars pumped into a single hillside in a place like rural Washington County. It means fewer well pads in total but much more activity on those that exist. It means that from a 10-acre spot, a company like EQT can theoretically slurp natural gas from underneath an area nearly the size of the City of Pittsburgh. 
“I call them mini-industrial complexes,” said David Schlosser, president of exploration and production at EQT.
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