Connecting the Dots/Update: Spotted Hawk Development LLC

Spotted Hawk Development, LLC, will present Case 13121, Thursday, August 26, 2010, before the North Dakota Industrial Commission requesting an order affecting Heart Butte, Van Hook, and or Deep Water Creek Bay-Bakken Pools to create and establish:

• One 6400-acre unit
• One 1920-acre unit
• Three 1280-acre units
• Three 1600-acre units

with authorization to drill "multiple" wells within each spacing units. These units are all close to the Arrow Pipeline. I have posted earlier regarding "mega-units." 

If I had the time, and I don't right now, I could put the following into one paragraph and connect them all: Spotted Hawk Development LLC, MHA (Fort Berthold Indian Reservation), Questar (QEP), KOG, XTO, XOM. The line that connects all these dots: the Arrow Pipeline.  All the dots can be connected by starting with the link to the Arrow Pipeline above.

If that isn't enough to get you interested, look at a story in today's Billings Gazette: Permit Activity Shows Montana Oil Back in Play. Deep in that story:

When the rush [for new permits] fired up two months ago, [Mark] Rehbein [Richland County commissioner] was thinking big. He suspected Exxon employees were flooding his hallways vetting the land dealings of XTO Energy, a company with a knack for extracting oil from tough places like the Bakken Shale straddling Montana, North Dakota and Canada.

XTO has a $2 billion stake in the Bakken. Exxon paid $41 billion for the company last December.

Oil insiders told Rehbein that Exxon’s move is still to come.

The anxiety about deep water drilling may be a bigger boon to the Bakken than we first realized. As a reminder, just a couple days ago I posted a link about experienced Louisiana roughnecks being flown into the Bakken to operate a sophisticated class of new, computer-operated rigs in the Bakken.

Other trivia: the tribal chiefs consider the Simba 24-30H (file number 18316) their best well to date. A spokesman says it is the longest lateral in the Bakken. My database confirms that, saying that the total depth is 21,630 feet. This was necessary because the two sections the horizontal targets are both completely under the lake, and the well had to be offset quite a distance to the east.

[Update: the following note was posted when I first posted this note. On August 6, 2010, I went back and checked the GIS map server and the error had been corrected.  So the following note is left there for archival purposes. (No one thanked me for pointing out the error. Smile.) Note: the NDIC GIS map service incorrectly links #17940 with the Simba 24-30H. One can find Spotted Hawk Development LLC wells by going to the NDIC GIS map server, clicking on "Well Search" on the sidebar on the left, and then select "SHD" on the drop down menu. SHD has another permit in 31-150-90, file # 19296, granted July 22, 2010. For some reason, this permit does not yet show up on the GIS map server. -- again, that has all been corrected by NDIC.]

MHA, by the way: Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Nation, the Three Affiliated Tribes, Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.