Bakkan Field

One of the biggest oil fields in North America is the Bakken formation
located under portions of the Montana, North Dakota and Canada. The Bakken formation is the largest contiguous oil deposit in the lower 48 states and covers over 200,000 square miles of the subsurface in the Williston Basin area  In April 2008, the USGS released a report estimating there are approximately 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in the Bakken formation.

The first wave of horizontal technology peaked at about 20 million barrels with an ultimate recovery of almost 41 million barrels. By using this analogy to review the total Bakken production vs. the cumulative production allows LUCA to approximate the production volumes of the two waves of horizontal technology. The first wave production curve indicates that if there are no new wells drilled, the ultimate recovery would be about 41 million barrels. In the second wave of horizontal technology, LUCA concludes that so far the second wave has added about 70+ million barrels of production. Therefore if the industry is able to keep up with this current rate for the next two years and is able to reach a cumulative recovery peak production of 150 million barrels then the ultimate recovery could be estimated as 300 million barrels without any additional new waves of development.