Future Looks Bright For Cline Shale

Rigzone is reporting.

The Eagle Ford shale play in South Texas has received a great deal of attention in recent years, but interest has also grown in the past two years in the Cline shale play in West Texas' Permian Basin, according to energy industry officials.

Found at a depth of about 9,000 feet and covering an area of approximately 1.6 million acres, the Cline production looks promising, though the 80 to 100 horizontal wells drilled to date are too few to draw any definite conclusions, said Alan M. Herbst, who heads New York-based energy and financial firm advisor Utilis Advisory Group LLC, in an interview with Rigzone.

"The information coming out on the Cline shale indicates up to 30 billion barrels of recoverable oil, which is substantially larger than other large plays," said Dr. M Ray Perryman, head of the Texas-based economic and financial analysis firm The Perryman Group.

The latest estimates seen for the Bakken top out at 11 (though they were recently doubled and could go higher). Eagle Ford top-end figures for recoverable oil are somewhere around 10 billion.

It's pretty much agreed that the Bakken/Three Forks is easily 24 billion bbls of recoverable oil but I won't quibble. 

So, again, for newbies:

• Williston Basin: Bakken
• West Gulf: Eagle Ford
• Permian: Cline (and others)