Sweet Spots Are Over-Emphasized In The Bakken -- August 30, 2019

[Later: more on "sweet spots" in the Bakken." A reminder: the Bakken "heat map" is linked at the sidebar at the right.]

Original Post

Either I'm way off base or laymen are getting really, really, good at defining "sweet spots."

Like down to the half-mile.

About seven years after I started to blog, I started to think/realize that the whole issue of "sweet spots" in the Bakken was being over-emphasized. The Bakken geographic footprint is not that huge. I've read a lot of geologists' reports over the years, and the thing that strikes me the most: the Bakken is pretty uniform.

I wish I had a date-time stamp for when I first thought that sweet spots in the Bakken were over-emphasized; it probably would have been in 2014 or thereabouts, after seven years of blogging.

The skill of the operator; the roughnecks; the frackers; and, the completion strategies, I think, mean a whole lot more than what "sweet spots" mean, all things being equal. If I had mineral rights in the Bakken I would be more interested in the operator than the location, at least going forward.

Case study.

First, go back to this post.

The "original" Hess EN-Davenport middle Bakken well: an absolutely lousy well based on total production. This well has produced barely 80,000 bbls in eleven years of production. "Modern" Bakken wells are producing that much in three months.

Now, fast forward to a recently completed CLR McClintock well.

The two wells:

• 16928, 82 (no typo), Hess, EN-Davenport-156-94-1003H-1, Big Butte, t11/108; cum 81K 6/19; 
• 35538, 1,833, CLR, McClintock 8-1H1, Pleasant Valley, t2/19; cum 117K 

For newbies:

• the Davenport well: 81,000 bbls in eleven years;
• the McClintock well: 117,000 bbls in 129 days

The wells are sited 4.4 miles from each other.

The horizontals are about 4 miles from each other. 

It's hard for me to believe that one well is in a "sweet spot" while the other one is not.

If one is in a sweet spot and the other is not, it's very, very clear to me that sweet spots can be incredibly localized in the incredibly uniform Bakken.

The graphics:

If sweet spots are important, it appears we're down to measuring "sweet spots" with less than a couple of miles in diameter. Those two "circular" areas above have a radius of about two miles.