The Four (4) TFS Benches -- The Williston Basin, North Dakota, USA

From a reader in response to today's posting on Surge's plan for waterflooding:

If you go to www.contres.com and click on operations then click on red river units you will read about the 7th largest onshore oil field in the lower 48. Cedar Hills Unit Red River B is described as a continuous DOLOMITE formation. They also talk about secondary recovery injecting air and water. They have been producing from this field since 1995.

I went to NDIC GIS map and zoomed in on Bowman County, picked out a random group of wells and came up the following results. Well file #16699 has produced 221,416 barrels of oil since 10/8/07. Looking at the monthly production record you can see that production for the last month was 5,721 BBLS. Its lowest point of production was in October of 2008 at 1,668. Since then production has steadily increased to today's rate.

Now look at well file 13948 and you will see a well that runs adjacent to and parallel to the first well. This well was completed 2/26/97. It produced 284,697 barrels of oil by June of 2008 before becoming an injection well.

About 4 months after 13948 became an injection well, 16699 started to rebound and has done very nice ever since.

Aren't the productive zones of the Bakken and Three Forks a continuous layer of DOLOMITE? Do you suppose there may be any similarities with the Red River Dolomite and the Bakken?

Do you suppose that some day when Continental has 4 horizontal wells drilled in the MB and each of the 4 TFS benches that they will only be 1/2 done drilling? With all those first wells eventually becoming injection wells.

Yes, I think that's a huge likelihood -- only 1/2 done.