Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Cottonwood Oil Field Updated -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Cottonwood Oil Field has always fascinated me. It was "discovered" by Fidelity (MDU) back in the 2008 time frame.

Fidelity never had any great wells in the Cottonwood and eventually sold their acreage in that field and others to Oasis. It appears that that deal was the beginning of Oasis as a major player in the Bakken.

I just updated the results of all the wells in the Cottonwood oil field.

Since the last update, there has been minimal activity. There are no rigs on site in the Cottonwood (according to the GIS map server) although one well is being completed.

The wells spudded/tested in 2008/2009 have been uniformly unremarkable, with one or two exceptions, but even the exceptions don't live up to Bakken expectations. Some wells are clearly stripper wells, and it appears some wells are kept going just to hold the lease.

The wells spudded/tested in 2010 are significantly better but still unremarkable. Rule of thumb for the Bakken is that the well is on its way to being paid for (at the well head) when it reaches 100,000 bbls of production. None of the wells in the Cottonwood have reached the 100,000-barrel threshhold. The best is about 70,000 bbls.

Overall, the Cottonwood does not yet impress me. 

3 comments:

  1. Is Oasis going to refrack any wells in the cittonwood field?

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  2. I don't have that kind of information, but three things:
    a) There's a lot of drilling yet to be done; lots of infill wells; as many as two, three, four or more wells on 640- and 1280-acre spacing in best Bakken.

    b) I think "they" will go back into a lot of "old" wells over the next 20 years, but there's no hurry, as long as they hold the leases by production.

    c) Oasis, BEXP, and WLL seem to have broken the code on fracking. So far, I have been very impressed with Oasis.

    But we will throw your question out to the readers and see if anyone else chimes in.

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  3. By the way, when I saw a particular field does not impress me, don't take that out of context. Wells in all these Bakken fields will eventually pay for themselves. But relative to other fields, some fields are simply not as good as others. But when there are "no" dry wells in the Bakken, and production holds a lease, there's all kinds of potential yet. I probably shouldn't be so hard on the Cottonwood.

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