Official: TFS May Have as Much as the Bakken

It's official: the Three Forks Sanish formation "holds nearly as much recoverable crude oil as the rich Bakken shale formation above it."  That's the word from Bismarck, ND.

The article states that most folks agree that the Bakken formation has about 2.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil in North Dakota. The North Dakota Industrial Commission (NDIC) estimates that the TFS has about 1.9 billion barrels of recoverable oil in North Dakota.

Others think there is even more recoverable oil: Harold Hamm, CLR/CEO, said two years ago or so that he felt there was as much as 8 billion barrels recoverable oil in the Bakken and the TFS in North Dakota.

My inappropriate exuberance is not misplaced.

[By the way, the Madison Group has produced almost 1 billion barrels of oil since oil was discovered in North Dakota. It's hard to believe that if the Bakken is as big as they say it is, it will only produce 2 1/2 times what the Madison Group produced. I won't live long enough to see, but it is an interesting conundrum.]