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Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Three Oil Formations Folks May Not Have Heard Of --- MoneyMorning.com

A reader sent this in as a comment, but told me I could delete the comment if I wanted, but in fact, the comment and information is too good not to share. There are three formations mentioned in this short article:
Woodford, the Tyler, and the Red River.
To get the entire article, apparently you need to enter your e-mail address at the bottom of the article.

It's worth it. (By entering your e-mail address, you will now receive an offer to subscribe to a newsletter. E-mail you care not to get, can be filtered. Spam does not bother me.)

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All three of these formations are on the sidebar at the right. 

Neither the Tyler nor the Woodford should be surprising to regular readers.

However, the Red River is a sleeper. A couple of things: recently a reader wrote in to suggest that the Red River was about to get very, very busy. He/she did not expand on that comment, but the timing is very, very interesting. That caught my attention. A couple days later, the story at the above link appears. 

For newbies who wonder about the potential of the Red River, go to the "Monster Wells" page and then scroll down to the Red River. 

8 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting the info Bruce. I kind of saw the article as some insight on where investors are looking, so its a speculative article. Whiting had a great presentation recently on the Red River wells they drilled in SW ND. With more companies drilling test well in formations that exists in SD (Red River, Three Forks, Tyler) I hope it wont be to long before SD is taken seriously and the next big play.

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    Replies
    1. I will fill in the details on the post later, but I want folks to look at the article first. The Red River is the one that caught my attention.

      My hunch is the Bakken is "sucking the air" out of all the other formations in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota right now. At $100 oil, if the Bakken wasn't productive, "they" would be going after the Red River and the Tyler.

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  2. I was interested in the Woodford because it is in Continental Resources home state of Oklahoma and their main focus outside of North Dakota. Doing some research on the internet I learned it was a formation in the greater Anadarko Basin.

    The Anadarko Basin long believed to be depleted and it was using vertical drilling. The Woodford was a tight oil shale formation long ignored because there was not an economical return using conventional means. Then along came the new technologies of combining horizontal drilling and hydro-fracturing and it all changed for the Woodford. It is a really thick formation so its potential is just being realized.

    Of course Harold Hamm of North Dakota fame was one of the first to realize the potential of the Woodford.

    That is why I said that Cushing would be back up for a long time taking into account the Woodford and the near doubling of production out of the Permian Basin. Bakken oil will have a hard time squeezing itself into Cushing for a long time.

    We may be seeing the eventual break-up of spot prices and less focus on WTI as the leading indicator.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I agree completely.

      "The Anadarko Basin long believed to be depleted ... Woodford was a tight oil shale formation...."

      This sounds exactly like the Williston Basin. The older legacy fields were depleting and then the Bakken, a tight oil shale formation, comes along....

      By the way, RBN Energy says the same thing about the possibility of a new pricing center separate from WTI, but they were thinking ECHO in Houston.

      I've also blogged, like you, that the Cushing is going to be overwhelmed with oil, and I'm wondering if we might see new facilities along the Canadian/US border to move oil east and west (east coast refineries like Delta's new refinery in Philadelphia) and the terminals in Washington State (just posted a few days ago).

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    2. Something will evolve but my crystal ball isn't giving me a clue, darn it. haha

      Combining the production of the Williston Basin and Alberta oil it would seem something like that would happen. As they say stay tuned.

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    3. Never in my adult life did I expect to see a "relative" glut of oil being produced in North America.

      With all the open space in the Williston Basin, and all the oil flowing through the area (especially if the Keystone XL is approved), it would be a natural to see increased storage capacity there (there is already a lot more storage capacity in just the last couple of years) but I think as long as there is doubt about EPA and fracking, folks are worried about making investments of this size in the Williston Basin. Perhaps I am over-reaching, but I sometimes wonder.

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  3. Red River will outbid Bakken and Eagle Ford ....race already have started....The difference of Whitings wells...(so as wells of another large private company who successfully targets Red River) is that they target Red River .C and D zones as a resources at !!! ...and some wells have produced 200k bbls in one year ! So you guys are right....Red River is a new BIG RESOURCE PLAY of the Williston Basin which by the way outbids both Bakken and Eagle Ford. There are only 3 companies that have figured this out yet....WLL, that private company I was talking about ...and us !

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    Replies
    1. The Red River, along with the Bakken and the Tyler, explains some of the high bonuses being paid for some acreage in the Williston Basin.

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