North Dakota Three Forks Oil Field find5 Feb 2025 16:55
How does the Three Forks Field (see extract below) affect the Zephyr non operated assets in the Williston basin?
The Bakken Petroleum System is part of the larger Williston Basin, which, according to a 2013 USGS study, has 7.4 billion barrels of oil that could supply the nation for at least 100 years.
It is comprised of two interconnected formations: the Bakken Formation and the Three Forks Formation, meaning there are essentially two main oil fields considered part of this system.
Geologists have considered Bakken rather mature, due to constant extracting, but the discovery in Three Forks could give it a second life.
Nesheim told Inforum that many drillers assumed additional drilling in the area would only lead to faster production of oil and gas rather than higher production, but he and his colleague Ted Starns suggested the opposite.
After we did our work, we believe that it's more than that, that when you drill middle Three Forks wells, you're getting more oil out of the ground long term,' Nesheim said.
'You're not just speeding up your recovery, but you're adding to your long-term recovery.
'We’ve done some of the research, and our hope is that companies will take our work and build on it, kind of giving them enough of a head start to do more.'
They found developing the reservoir could add up to two million barrels of recoverable oil per 1,280-acre spacing unit, an area of land assigned to a well or a group of wells with set limits on how much oil can be extracted.
Scientists are urging companies to set up more wells to extract the oil that is worth more than $18 billion.
The Parshall Field was set up to extract oil from Bakken in 2006, with oil and gas companies focussing on the Middle Bakken with horizontal wells.
The upper Three Forks developed between 2008 and 2010 and three years later, the middle Three Forks began producing oil.
The more than 360 wells in middle Three Forks amounted to about two percent of the drilling activity in the Bakken-Three Forks petroleum system, and about 1.7 percent of the total oil production to date, Minot Daily News reported.
The geologists conducted two studies, completed in 2024, which looked at oil production from 593 horizontal wells across 51 drilling areas, each covering 1,280 acres.
They found 17 areas had a clear increase in oil production from developing the middle Three Forks formation.
Interesting!!
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