A Dead Cow -- EOG To Drill In Argentina -- Not The Bakken

From Mike Filloon:

In the first two parts of this series we covered Kodiak's  upside given the new record Whiting well in its Tarpon Prospect. This is obviously bullish for Whiting, along with Newfield and other players in the area. EOG Resources stated it had a very large resource find in the Bakken that has an estimated thickness of 900 feet.

Don noted that from the EOG transcript, EOG was referring to Texas, from the transcript:

Mark G. Papa

Yes, Let me have Bill Thomas address the thoughts on the Vaca Muerta.

William R. Thomas

Yes, Ray, we've got a well planned in the first part of next year. And the section we're targeting there, we've got data that shows that it's relatively thick, about 900 feet thick, and it's got about 150 million barrels per section of oil in place. So it's certainly a world-class potential rock. And we're planning a horizontal well, and we will be conducting microseismic on it to monitor the frac and do all the science work to fully evaluate how the well fracs. And certainly, we'll follow up that and see how the well produces. So our expectations are really high for it, but we'll just have to see how it goes when we get the well completed.

If the middle Bakken is 900 feet thick anywhere in the Williston Basin, that will be a story! At least we think EOG was referring to Texas: "Vaca Muerta" is Spanish for dead cow.

See first comment below: this is in Argentina. 

Houston-based EOG Resources  plans to begin drilling at the Vaca Muerta shale reservoir in Argentina's Neuquén basin next year, CEO Mark Papa revealed.

"We will drill our first two wells in 2012. Our target is the Vaca Muerta shale, which we believe will be oil productive," Papa said during the company's 2Q11 results webcast.

EOG has taken a position of 100,000 net acres (40,468ha) in the area after forming a business relationship with Argentina's largest oil company YPF.