Marathon To Emphasize Eagle Ford Over the Bakken -- The Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Oil and Gas Journal story here. (some numbers rounded as is usual for this site)

Headline: Marathon Oil targets most of 2012 budget for Eagle Ford Shale.

Wow! That caught my attention. It's accurate, but not as "bad" as it appears:

• CAPEX: $5 billion
• 65% of CAPEX "is targeted to liquids-rich US assets including the South Texas Eagle Ford"
• Marathon oil will drill 250 - 300 net wells
• $3 billion allocated for Eagle Ford shale, the Bakken, the Anadarko Woodford, and the Niobrara
• Eagle Ford: ramp up to 17 rigs; 155 - 170 net wells; add 2 more fracking crews; total 4
• Bakken: 55 - 70 net wells
• Anadarko Woodford (Oklahoma): 25 - 35 net wells
• Niobrara (DJ basin, southeast WY and northern CO): 15 - 25 net wells

My hunch: this is a more a function of acreage owned than anything else.

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From wiki:

The Eagle Ford shale play area starts at the Texas-Mexico border in Webb and Maverick counties and extends 400 miles toward East Texas. The play is 50 miles wide and an average of 250 feet thick at a depth between 4000 and 12,000 feet. The shale contains a high amount of carbonate which makes it brittle and easier to use hydraulic fracturing to produce the oil or gas.[2] The oil reserves are estimated at 3 billion barrels with potential output of 420,000 barrels a day.

Everyone agrees the Bakken has 2 - 4 billion bbls of recoverable oil. It's current output is already 510,000 bbls a day and should easily get to 1 million bopd. Some opine there is much as 24 billion bbls of recoverable oil in the Bakken.