Marathon Oil CEO To Be Keynote Speaker At Annual Williston Basin Petroleum Conference

The Bismarck Tribune is reporting:

Lee Tillman, chief executive officer of Marathon Oil Corp., will give the keynote address at the 22nd Annual Williston Basin Petroleum Conference.

Also speaking:

• Harold Hamm of Continental Resources
• Tommy Nusz of Oasis Petroleum
• Jim Volker of Whiting Petroleum

The conference and expo will be held in Bismarck May 20-22. Registration opens at 9 a.m. Wednesday.

According to The Tribune: Exhibit space for the conference sold out in 17 minutes when Bismarck hosted the conference in 2012. More than 4,000 people registered, making it the largest event to be held in Bismarck-Mandan.

Prior to the conference, readers may want to review MRO's most recent presentation:

• 370,000 net acres
• 1,300 net wells inventory, up from 450 in 2011
• cost target, $7 - $7.8 million
• testing 320-acre spacing (4MB, 4TF1/1280)
• 6 TF2 wells in forward planning
• added a second frack spread
• will increase rig count by 20% each in Bakken and Eagle Ford
• Bakken: low-risk play

This may be the most interesting news (posted earlier). MRO has moved from open hole completions to 20 stages to 30 stages now. They will go back to all open hole completions and complete them to current best completion design; recompletions based on lessons learned from 9 recompletions accomplished in 2011. The recompletion results in an additional 280,000 bbls/wells; effectively "re-sets" the decline curve, not a trivial issue in the Bakken.

Perhaps other operators are recompleting their early wells, but MRO is the only operator I see talking so much about it.

Disclaimer: there might be errors in the data points from the presentation; I go through these quickly; I do not have narrative that accompanies the slides. 

To have the MRO CEO the keynote speaker is a big, big deal. Of all the operators in the Bakken, there are very few international operators; MRO is one of the few. Opportunity for CEO to compare the Bakken with rest of world.