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Listen to Harold Hamm and you leave convinced that America’s great shale energy boom is still in its infancy. There are enough natural gas reserves, he says, to allow America self-sufficiency for the next 200 years. As for oil, he says North Dakota’s Bakken field alone will “absolutely” double output to 2 million barrels per day, a bullish prediction no other industry leader will touch. “He’s a little bit over the top,” says Mark Papa, the former CEO of EOG Resources, the number four operator in North Dakota. His forecast tops out at 1.3 million barrels. The nearest bull to Hamm, Wood Mackenzie analyst Jonathan Garrett, won’t go past 1.7 million by 2020.
Hamm won’t be dissuaded. He says no other company has studied the geology as carefully as Continental. It knows where the oil is, he says, so it’s simply a challenge of figuring how much it can get out, as quickly as possible, at the lowest cost.
The technology that may determine how long and strong the recovery can get is being tested on a 2-square-mile plot in the Bakken that Continental calls the Hawkinson unit. Here Continental is experimenting with a “full field” technique–densely packing wells so that each rig (Hamm has 20 in North Dakota) can do considerably more than the current average of 10 wells per year. On the Hawkinson unit it has already drilled 14 wells, out of a planned 32. The wells go down roughly 3 miles, then curve horizontally for another mile to intersect one of at least four layers of oil-filled dolomite rock sandwiched in between impermeable layers of shale.
The drillers use explosives to pop small “perforations” in the sides of those horizontal pipes, then blast down millions of gallons of water mixed with sand to pulverize the rock and open up fractures, enabling the oil to escape. The trick is to position the “laterals” directly into the middle of those rock layers, but just far enough away from each other that the fractures don’t overlap. If this density works, there will ultimately be room for at least 100,000 total wells in the Bakken. (Fewer than 7,000 have been drilled so far.) The implication: If you assume a conservative average of just 300,000 total barrels per well, the ultimate recovery from the Bakken could be 30 billion barrels. The U.S. uses 7.5 billion barrels per year. “Suddenly, you see the enormity of what we’re talking about here,” says Hamm.
The risk, of course, is that if these wells can’t churn out that kind of output,

source: Forbes May 3rd