Update On The Montana Heath/Tyler

The Fairfield SunTimes is reporting, from information provided by Petroleum News.

This is an incredibly good article. Save for the archives.

“The Heath presents a multitude of challenges compared to the Bakken, ” Hauptman said. First, the Bakken, at between 11,000 and 13,000 feet, is much deeper than the Heath and is highly overpressured with the energy necessary to move the oil to the surface. The Heath, on the other hand, is shallow and under-pressured, “so you’re not getting Mother Nature to try and help you push it out. ”

The other challenge, according to Hauptman, is the rock itself. “The Bakken is like tombstone and you can drill through it with no problem at all … because it’s competent rock. ” But the geology of central Montana has been “up and down geologically many, many times, ” Hauptman added, and as a result the Heath Shale is highly faulted. That faulting, he said, present serious problems for drillers.

“You’re drilling in the Heath and all of a sudden you’re out of the Heath. All of a sudden you’re out 200 feet and you don’t know where to go. Do you go up? Do you go down? Do you do back up and do an open-hole side-track? These are all expensive things to do. This high-tech stuff is not cheap. I have first-hand knowledge of this. When you have those kinds of problems, suddenly your $5 million or $6 million authorization for expenditure is $8 million to $10 million. ”

When that happens, Hauptman continued, the number of barrels necessary to reach breakeven increases significantly.

A third challenge, according to Hauptman, is that there isn’t the competent rock in the Heath like there is in the Bakken, which, he said, causes serious drilling problems. “As you’re drilling it caves in behind you and you get your bit stuck, and you can’t get out of the hole so then you lose your whole drill string. These are the nightmares they’ve had out there. They don’t have that problem in the Bakken, ” he noted. “The Bakken’s just pretty much wellbore manufacturing cookie cutter. The Heath’s just not that way.”

But Hauptman firmly believes the Heath has oil. “There’s no question the oil is there. It’s a question of how does one get it out of the ground economically. That’s just the nature of the beast.”

And it is not unusual in the infancy of an oil play to have less-than-stellar well results. According to Lynn Helms, director of North Dakota’s Department of Minerals, “Things were very slow in the Bakken play for about two years until they cracked the code.”

As noted before, the Bakken is going to be hard to replicate.