Another Random Look At The Niobrara -- October 12, 2015

On the way to looking up something else, I came across an article in The Bismarck Tribune that I don't recall seeing before. I know I've linked stories like this before, and it's possible I've linked this story before:

Strike a 500-mile-long line due south from Williston (along the 103rd west meridian), and you'll eventually light in an area that is a near mirror-image of Bakken country. Just a few dozen or so miles east of the Rocky Mountain Front, the prairies of eastern Colorado, western Nebraska and Kansas, and southeastern Wyoming are home to an oil and gas play that has all of the earmarks of the Bakken, including technology, infrastructure and the companies punching holes. The play is called the Niobrara and it is so much like the Bakken that it's been tagged with the moniker "NeoBakken."

The Niobrara is one of North America's most extensive geologic formations. It underlies much of the American Great Plains, Rocky Mountain basins and northward into the Canadian prairies. In fact, if you're standing anywhere in North Dakota west of the Red River Valley, the Niobrara is somewhere under foot. Unlike the Bakken, however, the Niobrara is actually exposed at the surface, primarily in a thin belt from Cavalier County in the north to Sargent and Dickey Counties in the south. Whisk away the overlying glacial debris here and there, and you can easily see and touch the Niobrara.

The Bakken was more than a quarter billion years old when the Niobrara was deposited between 87 million and 82 million years ago. Geologists call that period the "Cretaceous" (Latin for "chalky"). At that time, North America was split by the Western Interior Seaway, which extended from what is now the Arctic Ocean to the Caribbean. The seaway endured for some 40 million years and reached depths of 2,500 feet and a width of up to six hundred miles.

In those days, what is now North America was much closer to the Equator, so the Seaway teemed with subtropical marine life ranging from microscopic plants and animals to sharks and mosasaurs (giant marine reptiles). While the eastern region of the Seaway bordering the Appalachians was relatively quiet, the western area received a near-continuous supply of sediments being washed in from the highlands to the west in what would later become the Rockies. The microscopic marine life mixing with sediments and rising and falling sea level was the perfect recipe for the formation of oil and natural gas - right out of a Geology 101 textbook.

Current oil and gas activity in the Niobrara is centered in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, a deep geologic structure that underlies eastern Colorado and adjacent parts of Wyoming, Kansas, and Nebraska. The basin is nestled against the Rockies to the west. The City of Denver is situated above its thickest point - some 14,000 feet, which is comparable to the Williston Basin's thickest point in northwestern North Dakota.

The Niobrara (sometimes called the Niobrara shale) is made up of two general units. The Fort Hays limestone (including shale layers), the lower unit, ranges between 10 feet and 60 feet in thickness. The Fort Hays is overlain by the Smoky Hills chalk, 200 feet to 1,400 feet thick. The Niobrara is found at depths of 8,000 feet (northwest of Denver). It outcrops in central Kansas and eastern Nebraska, as it does in North Dakota and South Dakota.

This story is timely for a number of reasons. First and foremost: look when the story was published -- April 9, 2015 -- well into the deep slide in the price of oil. This is not exactly the time one would think about looking at a "new" play.

Second, it is timely because RBN Energy just had an excellent blog on the Niobrara. I linked it earlier this morning and posted a bit of the essay but there was much, much more at the link. RBN Energy will archive its stories a few days after they've been posted. This is one you may want to read before you need to have a subscription to access it. 

There is another reason why The Bismarck Tribune story is very, very timely.  It has to do with one of the polls that was just closed out late last night. That's all I can say. Stay tuned.

By the way, for those keeping scorecards, I always though the big three tight oil plays were the Permian, the Bakken, and the Eagle Ford, with the Eagle Ford, dropping back a bit. I'm beginning to think that I have to add the Niobrara to either the top four or the top three.

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Hollywood Movie Set?

This had all the feeling of a Hollywood medieval setting. Any minute I thought I would see marauding Vikings attacking this peaceful little pumpkin patch:

Colleyville/Grapevine 2015