Miscellaneous Notes -- November 15, 2017

Quarterly state leases: over the past few quarterly leases, I have not seen a lot of activity in Divide County, maybe five to eight tracts being leased. But the November quarterly leases by the state saw huge interest in Divide County -- 61 tracts. For the entire state of North Dakota only 68 tracts were leased; 61 of them were in Divide County. In addition, five companies were involved in the leases, one or two I do not recall seeing before, including Norra Resources and Woodstone Resources (it's likely they've been in the state before but I simply forgot).

Sandowsky, Anschutz --> OXY --> Lime Rock --> Bruin: it's a little hard to keep track of all this. But several years ago, OXY bought most/all of Anschutz' holdings in North Dakota. Anschutz/OXY holdings were predominantly in the southwest corner of North Dakota, north of Dickinson. Subsequently, OXY sold out in North Dakota, transferring most of its wells to Lime Rock. A year or so ago, Bruin acquired about 60 wells from Lime Rock. Of interest now, Bruin is drilling a Sandowsky well in St Anthony (#34254). At least two readers have written me about this activity.
It looks like there are three Bruin Sadowsky wells in St Anthony and an Alfred Sadowsky well in Russian Creek oil field. Most recently (today -- November 14, 2017), in a comment elsewhere, a reader noted that the pad had been staked out. This well is about 7 miles directly north of Dickinson. There is another active well in this section, #17808:

• 17808, 80 (no typo); Bruin, Sadowsky 24-14H, t3/09; cum 182K 9/17, open hole; 12 stages; 2 million lbs; drilled by Anschutz; St Anthony oil field; a middle Bakken well; middle Bakken only 7 feet thick at this location (the completion form suggests the middle Bakken was 13 feet thick at this location; (Lodgepole: 376 feet thick; Madison, 25 feet thick; Mission Canyon, 155 feet thick); difficulty staying within the middle Bakken; came within one foot of hitting the upper Bakken shale; operators drilled vertically as deep as the Duperow (10,803 feet); gas peaks of 500 - 3,000 units; connection gases as high as 6,403 units; trip gases as high as 7,020 units; overall exposure to the thin, ideal middle Bakken target interval was estimated to be 95% (8,834 feet of 9,332 feet of lateral); currently (9/17) producing only 400 bbls/month, this well seems to be a candidate for re-fracking; it most likely will be shut in when #34254 is fracked;

Torpedo Federal: I follow these Slawson wells here. I can't imagine anyone being interested, but this is the link to the environmental impact study Slawson provided during the permitting process. It will open as a PDF, probably on your desktop.

SandRidge to buy Bonanza Creek: these are two familiar names from a few years back at the height of the Bakken boom though both operators were operating in non-Bakken plays at the time. From The WSJ:

• $750 million cash-and-stock deal
• Bonanza Creek and SandRidge were among the largest of more than 120 North American oil and gas producers bankrupted in recent years by plunging oil prices
• SandRidge: drills in Oklahoma and Colorado; filed for bankruptcy in May, 2016, with $8.3 billion of debt
• Bonanza Creek, drills in Colorado and Arkansas, held on until early this year; when it filed for bankruptcy in January, 2017, it reported $1.1 billion of debt
• SandRidge: current market cap of about $700 million
• Bonanza Creek: current market cap of about $650 million
• SandRidge was founded in 2006 by Tom Ward, who had earlier founded Chesapeake Energy Company (famed wildcatter aubrey McClendon) - within two years it had a market cap of more than $11 billion
• Mississippi Lime near the Oklahoma-Kansas border; wells produced unusually high volumes of wastewater -- costly to remove
• much more at the link