Charles Kennedy On The Bakken -- January 16, 2025

Locator: 44692B.

Charles Kennedy, link here:

North Dakota’s claim to oil fame has long been the Bakken shale, one of the top shale plays in the country. The Bakken is considered a rather mature play, but now, studies by researchers with the state’s Department of Natural Resources have opened up the prospect of a second life for the Bakken.

It is called Three Forks—a reservoir that lies within the Bakken shale play and may contain as much as 250 million barrels of crude as of yet untapped. And that oil is not too deep in the ground either, the researchers determined.

“The Three Forks Formation is a prolific unconventional oil and gas reservoir within western North Dakota and has been the target of approximately 8,000 horizontal wells through ~mid-2023,” the North Dakota Department of Natural Resources reports in an info sheet on the deposit. It goes on to note that most of the wells already drilled in the Three Forks Formation were drilled in the upper strata of the formation. In the middle layer, some 340 wells have been drilled, and in the lower layer, there have been only 50 wells drilled so far.

The reason is simple enough. Since the discovery of the Parshall field in the Middle Bakken back in 2006, most drilling has been concentrated there. Then the upper Three Forks followed between 2008 and 2010. In the early 2010s, drillers moved on to the middle Three Forks, with some 360 horizontal wells drilled there to date, producing around 92 million barrels of oil and 238 billion cu ft of natural gas. That only represents a modest 2% of the overall drilling activity in the Bakken play and less than 2% of total output.

 More to the link.