Spearfish Revival: Bottineau County Excites -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA -- September 23, 2011

What a great way to start out a Friday: link here.

For newbies, the Spearfish formation is NOT part of the Bakken formation; these are two of several "pay zones" in the Williston Basin.

The Bakken is the BIG one, but the Spearfish is garnering a lot of interest, and even the "legacy" formations are not to be counted out.

There is a revival going on with the Spearfish Formation in Bottineau County, said the state's top oil and gas regulator.
"The original company up there EOG has gone to Texas to play the Eagle Ford," said Lynn Helms, Bismarck, director of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources.

About two years ago EOG Resources announced it had made another domestic crude discovery the Spearfish play in North Dakota.

Helms recently told members of the Minot Area Chamber of Commerce's Energy Committee there are new players for the Spearfish now Corinthian, Legacy and Surge, which are Canadian companies.

The Spearfish play is part of the Wasada South Field, an extension of Manitoba's Waskada Field, which is 12 miles north of the Manitoba-North Dakota border.

He said these particular wells will be drilled down about 4,000 feet and then go out about 2,600 feet.

The Spearfish Formation is at a shallower depth than the Bakken Formation and is just above the Madison Formation.

As far as the timeframe of how long it will take to drill and bring one of the wells into production, Helms said, "It's going to take them a month to drill the wells, another month to frack them and then outfit them with tubing and put them onto production so you're talking three months by the time anything happens. There's going to be a lot of investment in the ground before any production," he said.

Because it is sour crude (high sulfur content), Enbridge no longer mixes it with Bakken (sweet crude: low sulfure content). Spearfish formation oil is trucked to Canada.