wolfcamp to rival the bakken !, page-26

Bugger me ! I hadn't finished my post and clicked the wrong button,sorry.

I meant to add this.


Wolfcamp. The Wolfcamp is the oldest Permian-age formation and consists of a complex mix of lime mudstones, detrital carbonates and dark, organic-rich shale. The Wolfcamp has long produced from vertical wellbores and is fairly pervasive in the Permian Basin. “In fact, the Wolfcamp interval is so ubiquitous, it is often mapped to demonstrate the general structure of the basin,” says Dan Morrison, managing director and senior research analyst for Global Hunter Securities LLC. He has published a series of reports on new Permian plays.

The hot new “Wolfcamp play” targets the formation horizontally with lateral wellbores through the carbonate intervals. Some references appear as “the horizontal Wolfcamp shale play,” but the play isn’t a “shale play” like that of the Barnett and Marcellus in which the lateral is landed through the shale section. Instead, it is like the Bakken in which the lateral is through the slightly more permeable and porous rock—a dolomitic siltstone, in the case of the Bakken—that is sealed at top and bottom by shale layers.

Currently, the horizontal Wolfcamp effort is focused in the southern Midland Basin in Crockett, Irion, Reagan and Upton counties, Texas, where the formation is some 1,500 feet thick at between 6,000 and 9,000 feet below the surface.

Wolfcamp also has horizontal potential in the Delaware Basin; however, the formation there is much deeper and results to date are mostly gassy, Morrison says.

Wolfcamp A, B, C and D refer to its four benches, each encased in shale. The “B” bench is the leading target, but the “C” bench is being tested and may add additional reserves and production to the play.


Penn shale, Cline, Cisco/Canyon. The Cline is an Upper Pennsylvanian shaley carbonate that lies just below Wolfcamp and is being tested horizontally in the Midland Basin, mostly in Glasscock County. In the Delaware Basin, operators are looking at Upper Pennsylvanian shaley and carbonate-rich intervals in Cisco/Canyon as well. Penn shale is used at times as a generic term for both of these diverse plays.

Morrison says, “Formations in the Permian Basin are identified by a variety of names, which can lead to some confusion among observers.”

Keeping up is necessary, however: The horizontal Wolfcamp play alone may make the Bakken look small, Morrison says. “The reservoir combo that makes it work doesn’t change over thousands of square miles, there are multiple benches and—unlike the Bakken—the Wolfcamp underlies a truly massive oil field, Spraberry Field.”