Dakota Oil Fields of Saudi-Sized Reserves Make Farmers Drillers
Anthony Effinger, Bloomberg, 03 Jun 2008
John Bartelson, who smokes Marlboro Lights through fingers blackened with tractor grease, may look like an average wheat farmer. He isn't. He's one of North Dakota's new oil barons.
Every month, he gets a check for tens of thousands of dollars from a company in Houston called EOG Resources Inc., which drilled two oil wells on his land last year. He says the day his first royalty check arrived was one to remember.
"I smiled to beat hell, and I went to town and had a beer," Bartelson, 65, says.
His new wealth springs from the Bakken formation, a sprawling deposit of high-quality crude beneath the durum wheat fields of North Dakota, Montana and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. ... Read full article
Editor's comment: The Bakken is an over 50 year old play which has been revitalized by horizontal drilling and a higher oil price. The USGS has announced huge reserves but has not discussed the potential production profile these reserves could ultimately provide. There is new money to be made in the Bakken (with the high oil price) and production is being increased substantially, however this will make little difference to the USA’s import requirements due to the nature of the Bakken reservoir. The challenge for recovery from the Bakken is the hard dolomite and shale lithologies with low (5%) porosity (a good sandstone reservoir would be 20% to 30%) and low permeabilities. Horizontal fractures contain most of the producible oil. Horizontal wells can tap these fractures but high rates of production are likely to be short-lived and overall recoveries will be low with the bulk of the oil remaining trapped in the rock matrix. It is certainly possible that the USGS has overrated the recoverable part of the resource. Nevertheless both North Dakota and Montana are set to see expanding output of indigenous oil, perhaps reaching 250,000 bbls per day in time.