The "New Stealth" Shale Play -- An Encore Play -- Not a Bakken Story

Update

According to the Western Shale event coordinator (see below), "the new stealth" is a generic term for emerging shale plays that have not hit the mainstream oil and gas media. So, "ignore" the original post below, except maybe as a reminder where Denbury might also have some additional holdings. I don't follow DNR closely enough to know how this all worked out.

Update to the update:

This is why I love the blog: here's an update sent in from Don on the Tuscaloosa play:
http://tuscaloosatrend.blogspot.com/2011/05/denbury-announces-tms-joint-venture.html (dated May 5, 2011)

Given our planned activity in our CO2 EOR operations in the Bakken and the relatively short period of time before leases were going to expire, we decided to seek a joint venture partner to continue testing the Tuscaloosa marine shale. We have entered into an agreement with a joint venture partner covering approximately 100,000 acres of the Tuscaloosa marine shale acreage that had not yet expired.

From RIGZONE, June 11, 2011: The Tuscaloosa Marine shale play, which covers 2.7 million acres across central Louisiana and southwest Mississippi, could emerge as the next big shale oil play. To put the 2.7 million acres in perspective, the four major oil-producing counties in North Dakota (Williams, Mountrail, McKenzie, and Dunn represent 9,032 square miles, and at 640 acres/square mile, works out to about 5.8 million acres in just those four counties. Including the rest of western North Dakota where the Bakken and Three Forks would probably double the 6 million acres to about 12 million acres. (Back of envelope calculations.)

Original Post

The "New Stealth" is "new" to me. From a message board:

Welcome to America’s newest “stealth” shale play. Encore reported that it has been amassing, over the past two years, a large acreage position in southern Mississippi and the Florida parishes of Louisiana. The company now holds a hefty 208,000 net acres in this emerging play. Here’s perhaps the most intriguing part – it’s oil, not gas. To be clear, the play is not entirely unknown – as early as 1997, an article published in the Houston Geological Society Bulletin by professors at Louisiana State University estimated resource potential to be a colossal 7 billion barrels (42 Tcfe). However, to our knowledge Encore is the only public E&P company to actually drill in this play in recent times, and initial results are encouraging.

The company has drilled two horizontal wells here thus far. The first, drilled out 1,500 feet, has been producing continually for the past seven days at a rate of 150 to 200 bpd. The second, drilled out 3,100 feet, was recently completed, and the company is awaiting production results. Our initial take is that this play could look tantalizingly like the Bakken, though of course we want to make it very clear that results here are extremely early, and economics are not yet established. Encore, of course, is a major player in the Bakken itself, with 178,000 net acres, but the company’s acreage in the Tuscaloosa play is even larger.

Update to that update: Halliburton frac trucks have arrived, June 6, 2011.