Wall Street Cheat Sheet Highlights Whiting's Bakken/Three Forks Potential; The Second Bench of the TFS; Heavily Fractured Tarpon; Middle Bakken, Upper Three Forks, Lower Three Forks

Added after I completed the post below: wow, there's a lot of information about the Bakken packed into these few paragraphs. This is quite incredible. 

I'm still waiting for the earnings transcript but until then, this may add to our understanding of "the Bakken."

First question:

Moving to Tarpon. Obviously another huge well there and as you move to pad drilling I’m wondering if you could give some color on in your 2013 budget of the wells that you’ve got for the Northern Rockies, what percentage or ballpark number on the wells you’re expecting to drill at Tarpon this year in your budget?

CEO's answer:

The Tarpon is a prolific reservoir. 

We feel like we’re doing an effective job in middle Bakken with three wells per spacing units. We have four operated spacing units and we plan to essentially drill that out during 2013. 

We also have opportunity in the Three Forks there which we will be pursuing probably in following year. 

What’s really interesting at Tarpon is that we have identified both there, as well as Cassandra another drilling opportunity. We believe that the second bench of the Three Forks has received a good charge from the Bakken Shale area and we are seeing good saturations from core data that we’ve collected there at Tarpon and so we think we got an additional objective there to pursue and that’s probably going to be either late this year or 2014. And we think we can get up to three wells per spacing unit in there. 

The thing to recognize about Tarpon is that it is heavily fractured, that explains the high rates that we got and so that’s the – the well density there is somewhat less in some of the other areas that we are drilling.

Second question:

Concerning Whiting's  inventory --  your presentation suggests that primary and prospective location is more than double what you had before. Then I am looking at your reserve in a sense resource base is up about 3% or so. What is the disconnect and why the resource potential did not increase or almost doubled in a way. Could somebody explain it to me?

CEO's answer:

... we haven’t added those in yet. It’s basically something that’s occurred over the last six months of 2012, as we have seen the potential for everything on them there, meaning three additional wells in the upper Three Forks/1280, four Bakken Silk (sic) Wells and four middle Bakken wells/1280, four lower Three Forks/1280, three lower Three Forks/1280, so these are all additional locations that can be drilled as a result of the results that we’ve seen so far and the reservoir engineering that we have done and the core that we have taken. 

So, those are basically new objectives. Then we go into the higher density locations: Pronghorn Sand higher density; that’s three more additional Pronghorn Sand. The higher density at Sanish, that’s three additional middle Bakken. 

... Sanish has the highest OOIP of any place in the Williston Basin... that’s why we have the ability to drill another 191 wells there. 

Go to the link for more. 

By the way, I believe "Bakken Silk" above is a typo at the source and should be "Bakken Silt."

From an undated PDF on the net regarding Whiting's discovery of the Pronghorn:

Based on the stratigraphic analysis, Whiting jumped ahead of other firms to acquire 1 million gross and 680,000 net acres where the thickest section of Pronghorn dolomite is extrapolated. Whiting currently has 20 rigs in the area and has completed 3.3 million linear feet of drilling, with 5 million feet projected by the end of 2012. The company has drilled more than 80 wells to define the "Pronghorn" and "Lewis and Clark" fields in Stark, Billings, and southernmost McKenzie counties, North Dakota. The IP of the initial wells averaged 2,021 bopd and have been as high as 3,611 bopd. The take‐away message from this successful project is that geology matters!

As "anon 1" suggested, if Chesapeake were to sell, Whiting might be the perfect buyer.