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Since acquiring its South Antelope acreage in eastern McKenzie County last year, QEP Energy is finding the property to be every bit as productive as anticipated when the acquisition was announced. When the Denver-based independent announced the acquisition in August of 2012, it reported an average estimated ultimate recovery, EUR, of more than 1 million barrels of oil equivalent for Bakken wells on the property. Second-quarter production results are suggesting that million-plus barrel EUR may not be far off the mark. Prior to the transaction,...
Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp. stopped short of declaring its crucial well down-spacing program a success, cautioning analysts and others not to overplay initial production results from one of its two crucial Williston Basin pilot projects, until more production data can be collected and analyzed. And that will take time. But the company left no doubt that its Polar and Smokey pilots “will have a significant impact on how we lay out our future development programs,” declared Russ Branting, Kodiak’s executive vice president of operations. Moreo...
TransCanada has announced it has enough binding, 20-year shipping contracts to launch Energy East, its C$12 billion venture spanning 2,700 miles from the Alberta oil sands to New Brunswick, possibly picking up Bakken crude along the way. The crude could serve as feedstock for refineries in Ontario, Quebec and ending with the 300,000 barrels per day Irving Oil facility at Saint John, New Brunswick. The prospect of moving 1.1 million barrels per day of crude from Alberta to Atlantic Canada for the first time, starting in 2018 — with 900,000 b...
In an Aug. 2 conference discussing second-quarter financial and operating results, Southwestern Energy Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President William Way said the company had concluded testing of its second Bakken well and added that the company was disappointed with the test results and plans were to move on to opportunities in other plays. However, Way did not provide any further details on the Bakken wells. There is no record of any recent Southwestern Energy activity in North Dakota according to North Dakota Industrial...
last week we reported that the 60-some rigs shown on an Apache Corp. NW Montana map could not have been rigs, but at the end of the piece we said the rigs could possibly have been wells. However, earlier in the Insider piece we said they probably weren’t wells, which was incorrect. Our apologies. We also said Apache might unveil plans for its NW Montana acreage in an Aug. 1 earnings call, which didn’t happen. Apache did say that it continues to market assets (largely unnamed) in order to rebalance its portfolio by year-end. —Kay Cashm...
SM Energy continues to see steady increases in its quarterly Bakken/Three Forks production while at the same time is seeing its average cost per well decrease as its transition to pad drilling continued in the second quarter. Information released on July 31 indicate SM Energy’s second-quarter Bakken/Three Forks output was up 12 percent over the first quarter and up 15 percent over its fourth-quarter 2012 production. SM Energy’s average well cost in its Gooseneck prospect in Divide County declined 8 percent from $7 million at the end of 201...
Thanks to “having the best acreage,” the “best in-house completion technology” and “lower cost” wells, EOG Resources now gets more than a 100 percent “direct after-tax reinvestment rate-of-return” in three “premier” U.S. resource plays — the Eagle Ford, Bakken and Leonard. Calling the three plays EOG’s “engines of growth,” in a second-quarter earnings call Executive Chairman Mark Papa said the company would spend the most capital in the regions in 2013, while President and CEO William R. “Bill” Thomas said each of the plays have “more than 10...
With up to 33 new wells, Statoil leads the list of operators filing applications in July with the Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation seeking authority to drill additional Bakken/Three Forks wells in the Bakken petroleum system on existing spacing units. All applications are on the board’s Aug. 8 hearing docket. Statoil’s 33 proposed wells are spread across eight separate spacing units in Richland and Roosevelt counties where the company currently has at least one well in each unit. Seven of the spacing units are 1,280 acres and the rem...
Although first-half well completions across Canada lagged 8.8 percent behind the same period last year, horizontal drilling in three of the four western provinces set new records. Overall, the industry posted 3,813 development completions and 485 exploratory wells (excluding experimental wells), lagging behind the 2012 pace of 3,999 and 723. Oil well completions (development and exploratory) in Western Canada dropped to 3,510 from 3,633, while natural gas-targeted wells slumped to 716 from 953. Operators in Alberta completed 2,200 oil wells,...
Grand Forks, N.D. area businesses are growing to meet demands in the Bakken region of North Dakota, the region’s chamber of commerce said in an Aug. 6 press release. The Chamber – Grand Forks/East Grand Forks, on behalf of the region’s Bakken Initiative, surveyed its members, revealing that businesses are “attributing both revenue and employment growth to business activity related to the oil and gas industry,” the chamber said. Sixty-seven percent of the respondents attribute “some of their revenue” in the past two years to Bakken activi...
Norwegian-based Statoil released second-quarter production data on July 25, and the results indicate the company’s Bakken production from the Bakken petroleum system basically held steady through the first two quarters of 2013, but was down slightly from the fourth quarter of 2012. Statoil’s daily equity production in the Bakken averaged 45,100 barrels of oil equivalent per day in the second quarter, nearly flat with the 45,300 boepd the company averaged in the first quarter, but down a perceptible 3.4 percent from the fourth quarter 2012 ave...
Halcon Resources saw marked improvements in its initial production rates on some of its Williston Basin wells in the second quarter, and the company attributes the increase to changes in completion techniques, particularly in hydraulic fracturing. In an Aug. 1 press release, Halcon said that the “performance of wells that have been completed with modified completion techniques is currently above previously published type curve estimates.” That message was reiterated by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Floyd Wilson in an Aug. 1 con...
Abbreviations & parameters With a few exceptions, the Montana weekly oil activity report includes horizontal well activity in the Bakken petroleum system in the eastern/northeastern part of the state within the Williston Basin. It also includes the Heath play and what is referred to as the South Alberta Bakken fairway in northwestern/west-central Montana, which is at least 175 miles long (north-south) and 50 miles wide (east-west), extending from southern Alberta, where the formation is generally referred to as the Exshaw, southwards through...
For the fourth week in a row Statoil has taken the No. 1 spot on the Top 10 IP chart for North Dakota wells producing from the Bakken petroleum system, which includes formations such as the Bakken and Three Forks. IP, which stands for initial production, is the rate at which a well produces during its first 24 hours online; in this case, active oil wells that were filed July 30 to Aug. 5 with the North Dakota Industrial Commission, or NDIC, as completed or released from confidential status. The top well this week was Statoil’s Esther Hynek 1...
Subscribers: To view the "North Dakota oil permit activity" chart, please visit the above PDF link....
Subscribers: To view the "IPs for North Dakota Bakken wells" chart, please visit the above PDF link....
On Aug. 6, Calgary-based PetroShale Inc. said it has implemented a new corporate structure for its Denver-based U.S. subsidiary, PetroShale (US) Inc., in which two wholly-owned subsidiaries of PetroShale (US) were created. One of the new subsidiaries is a holding firm for proved producing assets, while the other is a holding firm for PetroShale’s leased U.S. acreage and new wells. The new subsidiaries will be known as PetroShale (US) Land 1 LLC and PetroShale (US) Production LLC, respectively. PetroShale also said it has established a new t...
While heavy rains and flooding impacted ConocoPhillips’ second-quarter activity in the Williston Basin, the company still managed to increase production by approximately 3.4 percent over the first quarter of the year with an average production of 30,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. According to Executive Vice President for Exploration and Production Matthew Fox in an Aug. 1 second quarter conference call, ConocoPhillips is “getting back on track” and currently has 11 drill rigs operating in the basin. According to North Dakota Indus...
The Wall Street Journal reported that Zenergy Inc. has enlisted bankers to shop its North Dakota acreage, which would likely fetch more than $1 billion if sold, according to the Journal’s sources. As of press date, the morning of Aug. 8, Zenergy had not yet publicly, or in response to a phone call from Petroleum News Bakken, confirmed the information. But the company remains active in North Dakota, with two rigs drilling in McKenzie County (down from three in mid-July), per North Dakota Industrial Commission records. Tulsa, Okla.-based Z...
Halcon Resources Corp. said that Floyd C. Wilson, chairman and CEO, is scheduled to present at EnerCom’s The Oil & Gas Conference 18 in Denver, Colo., on Aug. 13 at 3:30 p.m. EDT. The slide presentation and a link to the live audio webcast will be available on the company’s website at www.halconresources.com on the day of the presentation. The live webcast will also be available on The Oil & Gas Conference website at http://theoilandgasconference.com/webcast.shtml. Halcon Resources Corp. is an independent energy company engaged in the acq...
Quality Mat said June 28 that it was pleased to feature Young Life in Southeast Texas as its nonprofit organization of the month. Young Life is an organization of caring adults committed to reaching out to kids and being involved in their lives in a variety of ways. That involvement takes many forms, from attendance at sporting event or school functions, to simply being a sounding board for youth concerns. Quality Mat helped complete a $75,000 peaches fundraiser for the Young Life organization, which purchased 170 cases of peaches to donate to...
Welcome to the first annual edition of The Bakken Explorers magazine, brought to you by Petroleum News Bakken, a weekly newspaper that covers oil and gas activity in the Bakken petroleum system of the Williston Basin. It will be the can-do attitudes of the basin’s explorers that continue to break the technological, geological and economic barriers, keeping the Bakken’s oil and gas production growing, and then stable, for decades to come. Our only regret is that we were not able, for various reasons, to feature all the explorers in this fir...
Industry representatives polled more than a year ago by Petroleum News accurately predicted that the federal government would end up at least doubling the amount of crude oil that could be technically recovered from the U.S. portion of the Bakken petroleum system. That’s largely because the 2008 study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey did not include crude oil estimates for the Three Forks formation, which many believe to be as prolific as the Bakken formation. And that’s how it shakes out in the long-awaited, updated USGS study rel...
Within the Bakken petroleum system, Sheridan County, Montana’s most northeastern county bordering both North Dakota and Saskatchewan, tends to stay off of most people’s radar. However, Sheridan has seen its share of oil and gas activity over the years, and activity in the county, both conventional and unconventional, continues today, drawing little attention. Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation, MBOGC, records indicate that approximately 1,150 wells have been drilled in Sheridan County dating back to the early 1950s. As of mid-July 2013,...
Talk to anyone who knows anything about exploration for oil in the Williston Basin and the name Slawson will invariably come up. Since drilling its first well in the Williston Basin in the 1970s, Slawson Exploration has become an industry leader in exploring new frontiers and has developed a reputation as an innovative and aggressive company not afraid to venture into new territory, both geologically and technologically, in its quest to develop oil. In fact, in a recent conversation with Petroleum News Bakken, one North Dakota state official sa...
