Continental eyes Woodford, other southern Oklahoma plays

Oct. 10, 2012
The Devonian Woodford shale in southwest-central Oklahoma is a largely undeveloped oil and gas formation with at least several billion bbl of liquids recoverable, Continental Resources Inc. said Oct. 9.

The Woodford shale in southwest-central Oklahoma is a largely undeveloped oil and gas formation with at least several billion bbl of liquids recoverable, Continental Resources Inc. said Oct. 9.

The Woodford resource play in the mature multipay southeastern Anadarko and northwestern Ardmore basins has a net reserve potential to Continental of 1.8 billion bbl of oil equivalent on 170,600 net acres the company has accumulated in Grady, McClain, Garvin, Stephens, Carter, Murray, and Love counties.

Continental said 23% of its acreage in the play is held by production today, while only 3% of the 94,000 acres it held at the end of 2010 was HBP. The company has drilled or participated in 35 wells, derisking more than 600 sq miles.

The siliceous Woodford shale is as thick as 400 ft, is among the thickest, best quality shale reservoirs in the US, and has six times the reservoir volume of the Cana Woodford play farther to the northwest in the Anadarko basin, Continental said.

The Upper and Lower Woodford in this area, both of which are proven to be commercial, contain 25-50% oil and 60-75% total liquids and would be accessed by wells with stacked horizontal laterals and multistage fracs, Continental said.

The company calculated that at $90/bbl oil and $3.50/Mcf gas it has 2,200 net economically drillable, 80-acre locations on its acreage and would reap a 40-55% rate of return.

The emerging Woodford play area is interspersed with the giant Golden Trend, Healdton, Knox, and Sho-Vel-Tum fields, which have produced a combined 3.2 billion bbl of oil from 60 reservoirs since the dawn of the last century.

In that massive stratigraphic column, Continental said it has identified new potential in numerous conventional reservoirs that can be assessed while drilling to the Woodford and that it also sees and is testing other oil resource plays on more than 50,000 net acres that have 88 million boe of net unrisked potential.