Bakken Three Forks Infrastructure, Takeaway Woes Only Threats to High Activity

The Bakken/Three Forks shale play occupies roughly two-thirds of the 3,000-sq-mi Williston basin and spreads beneath most of western North Dakota, and eastern Montana, and into Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Most operators entered 2012 with plans for aggressive drilling and production programs, showing no E&P slowdown on the foreseeable horizon. Over the past year, Bakken operators employed a variety of new technologies that ran the gamut, from fostering better reservoir understanding to closed-loop solids processing. The Schlumberger Rt Scanner triaxial induction service is one of the technologies helping operators in the more recently delineated and less-understood Three Forks formation more accurately compute hydrocarbon saturations and other reservoir properties. The results of an Rt Scanner analysis give operators a way to effectively evaluate, on a well-by-well basis, the quality of the reservoir.