Cedar Hills Field: Flashback

 Updates

May 14, 2012: update of Red River wells in Cedar Hills. 

Original Post

With all the news coming out of the Bakken and out of CLR in the past several days, I kept running across the "Cedar Hills oil field."

I never followed that field very closely; by the time I started blogging, oil activity had started to move from the Red River formations to the Bakken formations in and around the reservation. But for those interested, here's a nice flashback to 2007 and a look at the early development of not only Cedar Hills but also the Bakken by Continental Resources.

At that time, the "Red River formations" accounted for 54% of CLR's production in the Rocky Mountain region; these units were in the Cedar Hills Anitcline in North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. In 2004, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) listed this field as the 23rd largest field in the United States. In North Dakota, CLR's activity in the Cedar Hills field is in Bowman County, along the South Dakota and Montana border, in the very southwest corner of the state.

Most of the horizontals in the Cedar Hills field are a bit longer than a typical short lateral, and there are some areas with as many as eleven (11) laterals or parts of laterals running through a section (28-131-106).  This helps explain why the Red River formations account for more than 10 percent of total oil production coming out of North Dakota since oil was first discovered in North Dakota in 1951.

It should be noted that drilling into the Red River is declining. From the Director's Cut: "Bowman County Red River production is declining again as there are now just 2 wells drilling."





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