The First Bakken Well

Updates

June 11, 2013: this website on the Bakken received an interesting comment today:

I came from Fargo to Tioga in 1952 to work for Christianson who built a lot of homes there. I bought a new 1952 Chevrolet from the car dealer in Tioga. I met the Iverson boys and their pretty sister. I was 17 years old. I remember Clarence would come into the bowling and pool hall in Tioga with ten $100 dollar bills pinned on his necktie. Harry Truman came to Tioga.

November 24, 2012: whenever I get comments like the first comment below, I feel very, very humbled.  I cannot express adequately the appreciation I have for folks who take the time to explain the Bakken, and correct my errors. I moved the comment up here because some folks may not read comments. My original post has some wrong information in it. I prefer not to change it, so I put lines through the major errors and refer the reader back to the comment:

The H.O. Bakken # l never produced oil from the "Bakken." The zone labeled Englewood was what we know today as the "Bakken." The Lyleton is today's "Three Forks." 

The Upper Devonian is now called the Duperow. The geologist's of 1952 thought the shale section at 9600 feet was much like the Englewood Shale of Alberta but they soon realized it was not the Englewood. 

The geologist at the H.O. Bakken simply put brackets around this section on the well log and for the  lack of a name simply wrote "Bakken." In later geologic discussions it became common for all geologists to refer to this zone as the "Bakken." The name stuck.  

Another distinction for the H.O. Bakken #1 was that it was the first well to produce oil from the Madison Formation. This zone had been overlooked in the Clarence Iverson discovery.  

The Bakken started to "unload oil and drilling mud" while the crew was pulling pipe to change bit. The well was then drill-stem tested and then it flowed oil to surface! That kicked off the major development of Madison fields along the Nesson Anticline in Williams, Mountrail and McKenzie Counties. The Madison was the primary  zone in the Tioga and Beaver Lodge Fields as well as many others. The deeper Duperow, Siluran, Interlake and Red River zones were found at the southern Beaver Lodge, Charlson, Blue Buttes fields, etc.

Original Post

From The Dickinson Press, November 24, 2012:

The Amerada Petroleum Co. began drilling the Henry O. Bakken well on July 13, 1951, and first encountered oil on Sept. 5 of that year, according to a program for an oil strike celebration the family held weeks later.

Production didn’t begin on the well until April 1952, according to the North Dakota Industrial Commission. Today, Bakken wells are drilled in less than a month.

“Back in those days, that was a huge undertaking, drilling to that depth,” Neset said.

The Henry O. Bakken well produced a total of 255,526 barrels of oil, which is a significant amount for a well that was drilled vertically, Neset said. She believes they must have encountered a naturally occurring fracture in the rock layer to get that much production.

Going to the NDIC website, this well now has a different name, the name provided at the time Amerada Hess elected to abandon it. I may have missed it, but I did not find the sundry form that documented the name change.

• 32, PA/217, Amerada Hess, Tioga-Madison Unit G-123/Henry O. Bakken No. 1, a Madison well, according to the site, s7/13/51, t4/16/52; cum 255,556 bbls, last produced August 1967; PNA in 1990;

Yes, only the 32nd North Dakota oil and gas permit. Officially it is described as a Madison well (the Charles formation, Mission Canyon, and Lodgepole).

Unless I missed it there was no "Bakken" formation identified. A handwritten stratigraphy profile:

• Lodgepole, 8,500
• Englewood, 9,615
• Lyleton, 9,750
• Upper Devonian, 9,910
• Devonian salt, 10,960
• Ashern, 11,500
• Stony Mountain, 12,450
• Red River, 12, 550
• Winnipeg Shale, 13,410
• Winnipeg Sand, 13,559
• Total depth, 13,709

The Upper Devonian would have been the upper Bakken, the Devovian salt the middle Bakken. See comment below and/or in the update.

The geographic location of permit #32:

• 1,985 feet FNL, 659 feet FWL, 12-157-95.