The Wattenberg Field, Niobrara Shale, Denver Basin -- Bonanza Creek Energy, Investor Day Presentation

This is an incredible presentation. Unfortunately it is just the transcript at SeekingAlpha and not the slides. However, the transcript my follow the company's March, 2013, corporate presentation, a PDF file.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on what you read here or what you think you read here. I am not even all that interested in the Niobrara, but this presentation helps me understand the Bakken better, and it definitely puts the Bakken into perspective.

The presentation:

• slide 10, IRR's, particularly interesting; look how far to the right the dry gas plays are; among the tight oil plays the Bakken is also to the right; the Eagle Ford is far to the left; Mississippi Lime, interestingly enough is to the left also.
• five pay zones in the Wattenberg; the Bakken will have three or four
• EURs: 300K (short laterals?), 65% oil; the Bakken, around 600K, and closer to 90% oil, I believe
• cost per well: $4 million; I believe these are short laterals (?); long laterals, over $8 million

Back to the SeekingAlpha article. This is a 27-page-internet article; way too long to summarize.

One interesting takeaway from the article:

Long reach laterals put a lot of eggs in one basket, okay and so if you have a failure in your long reach lateral wells instead of having the $4.2 million investment in our record horizontal well, go south where you say, now we've got a $7.5 million to $8 million investment to go south if you part [casing] and can't recover the well, something like that. 

So to recover that it’s significantly more cost to get that. The repeatability of being able to do the beauty of the Niobrara play and the beauty of these unconventional resource plays is repeatability, being able to drill and execute back to back to back counting on success, low risk chance of failure. 

Long reach laterals, we still have to get to the mechanical part of this so that we can execute this over and over again because when we frac these things along these lateral, you are talking 36 to 40 stages. Our regular laterals are 18. So that means we have to do that thing 40 stage. We have to do that perfect every time, over and over again. So there is some risk.

There was a long discussion on completion techniques: common is 30 stage sliding sleeve, and final 10 stages, plug and perf; the latter is not preferred. 

I said that when I first started the blog: there are "no" DRY wells in the Bakken (yes, rarely), but that's about the only way operators are willing to risk $8 million on a well; they know they will hit. And they will keep getting better.

And that's just at the beginning of the article. A huge amount of information which will help folks understand shale and will put the Bakken into perspective.

In the Niobrara, a short lateral: twelve days to drill and three days to complete. Compares favorably to what is going on in the Bakken.