Founder Effect. The Founder Effect is defined as a type of bottleneck, a type of genetic drift describing the loss of the allelic variation that accompanies founding of a new population from a very small number of individuals (a small sample of a much larger source population).
For example, two well drilling companies -- one in Pennsylvania and one that covers New Hampshire, Vermont and central Massachusetts -- state the cost for drilling a well and outfitting it with pump equipment averages between $5,000 and $7,000, at the time of publication.
So all in, for a company that drills 100 of these wells per year and has their technique and efficiency down to an art, it costs in the range of $8-12 Million per well. In the Eagle Ford it's around $6-8 Million per well.