In today's daily activity report, it was noted that seventeen wells in Bottineau County changed operator. Corinthian Exploration (USA) Corporation has now acquired these seventeen wells, including the recent Bernstein wells. They used to be operated by Ritchie Exploration.
I assume Corinthian Exploration is related to Corinthian Energy headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, but do not know for sure. When you go to www.corinthianenergy.ca you end up at a website for Surge Energy. Corinthian Energy was bought by Surge Energy in 2010.
My hunch is that Surge Energy (SGY) is the name of the company in Canada, and its operating division in the US is Corinthian Energy.
The two Bernstein wells (#19384 and #19385) were drilled and completed in less than four days. I believe they were strictly fracked vertical wells, based on well file reports and the icons on the GIS map server. The IP was the same for both wells: (5) and cumulative oil appears to be extremely low (uneconomical?) but I don't have enough experience with Spearfish wells to know what the expectations are. A pump has been put on each of these wells.
Other posts earlier this evening linked the sources suggesting to me that Surge Energy will go back into these old vertical Spearfish wells and lay in horizontal laterals.
I have to thank one of my readers for alerting me to a couple of data points that piqued my interest in pursuing this. It's starting to come together. You might have to read several posts that were put up tonight to put together the whole story. It started out a bit disjointed but it's starting to come together.
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Later. Actually the more I think about this, the more excited I get. Investors might want to take a look at the SGY corporate presentation which can be found at the link above, and then look at Yahoo!Financial SGY.V.
Look at the economics of the Surge Spearfish wells just north of the border:
- Cost to complete a well: $1.2 million
- Typical production for a horizontal fracked Spearfish well: 2,400 bbls/month the first year; 28,800 bbls the first year; at $50/bbl = $1.4 million (note: $50/bbl; oil is now $105/bbl)
- Payout: 0.9 year
- EUR: 65K at $50 = $3.25 million (note, current price of oil is $105/bbl)
A EUR of 65K looks pretty paltry compared to Bakken wells, but Surge's core competency is tapping into multiple pay zones from the same well; once one has any production, that well holds the lease by production for all "eternity"
