December 3, 2007
Billions of barrels of oil found in Eastern Montana

By JENNIFER McKEE
Gazette State Bureau
HELENA - The low point came when the things got so tight that Billings petroleum geologist Richard Findley flirted with the idea of taking a second job as a restaurant cook.

He was working out of his basement, looking for oil in an Eastern Montana field almost nobody else wanted. Then, in 1996, he and his partner accidentally stumbled across a porous layer of dolomite 9,000 feet below ground at a site just a little west and north of Sidney.

That serendipity turned out to be the largest on-shore oil discovery in the continental United States in better than 20 years. Today, the oil field Findley found - and the technology he helped develop to extract the oil - has made millionaires out of ordinary Montanans, has swollen state coffers and ushered in a new philosophy of oil prospecting worldwide...

The Williston Basin is a geologic formation beneath a good chunk of Eastern Montana, most of North Dakota, parts of South Dakota and the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Within the basin is something called the Bakken Formation. The Bakken (rhymes with "talking") is a sandwich of two slabs of black shale surrounding a layer of limestone, siltstone, sandstone and dolomite, another kind of sedimentary rock...

More:
http://billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/12/03/news/state/20-oil.txt

Figure 1-10 here http://www.searchanddiscovery.net/documents/2006/06035flannery/index.htm describes the middle member.

Chris

This article appears to talk a bit about the Middle Bakken formation exploitation going on in Canada.

The prize, the scientists and analysts say, is something between 100 and 500 billion barrels of oil. If they were correct, then the Canadian share of the wealth � spread across the shallow northeastern fringe of distribution of oil generated in North Dakota � would be in the range of five to ten billion barrels or more of original oil in place.

(emphasis mine)

Seems like they can't quite narrow it down well up here, either. But at least it makes specific reference to OOIP.

Its Saskatchewan Middle Bakken wells are shallow � 1,600 metres - relative to those in Montana, which are typically twice as deep. The Mission wells typically have 100 to 1,400 metres of lateral direction. The proprietary Halliburton completion process entails equally-spaced multiple fractures � typically ten at 120-metre separations � utilizing 10 to 12 tonnes of sand.

It should not come as much of a surprise to most of us here that it's not exactly a gusher...

The initial production rate is typically 165 barrels of oil per day, with 710 cubic feet of sales gas per barrel, and 130 barrels of hydrocarbon liquids per million cubic feet, for a net 1.25 barrels of oil equivalent of value per barrel of oil produced.

Still, I'd like to have one of those on hand in, say, 10 years.

The article mentions a related oil shale play in neighbouring Manitoba, albeit very briefly.

"Assuming there is 100 billion barrels available (a big assumption)"

assume the moon is made of white cheese and we will never run out, assume the earth is filled with a core of light sweet abiotic idiotic crude, assume anything you like.