The key in unconventional oil like the Bakken is economic extraction over a widespread area.
It is proving very difficult to find another Bakken.
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are you also arguing that you’ve seen the geology in the permian basin and its convinced you that despite recent reports that the Permian basin has more addressable oil than the the world’s largest oil field —the Saudi Gwadar oil field—that this oil is NOT addressable. Or at the very least you can’t get the same kind of economies of scale in the Permian basin that you can in the bakken—because the oil is so spread out.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/05/24/the-amount-of-oil-in-this-american-oil-patch-is-go.aspx
Therefor we will not see the sort of parabolic rise in oil production in the Permian basin that we’re seeing in the Bakken. That further the bakken oil production rises will continue to be parabolic past the end of 2015.
To be fair here Pioneer Natural Resources is not suggesting that there is anything like +200 billion in addressable oil in the Permian basin. Rather their numbers are in the 75 billion barrel range of addressable oil. This might seem plausible to many because there are so many more pay zones stacked on each other in the permian basin than in the eagle ford or the bakken.
anyhow, what say ye?
In the Williston basin, the geology is relatively simple so one can drill laterals 2 miles into a very thin zone that is less than 35’ thick.
Two things here:
1. It is only 35’ thick, so the Oil In Place is not all that much. The reason it produces at such good rates is the presence of A. a high quality (+40 API) oil. B. significant overpressure and C. most importantly, lots of natural fractures. These fractures are caused by the stresses placed on the brittle interval sandwiched between two world-class source-rock shales as the oil exits the shales.
2. the Permian has a much more complex lithologic extent, causing well laterals to not stay in zone nearly as much as the target zone comes and goes. One cannot frac into the shales here and expect to get much oil.
How much oil is anybody’s guess. My own is that we are reaching the limits of peak production as infill drilling occurs and we find interference between wells(which means the new wells are competing with older wells for same oil).