Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Continental Resources Bakken Field Results (CLR)

The stock is up 22%.
Here's the press release:

..."The Bice 1-29H flowed at an average rate of 693 barrels of crude oil equivalent per day during its initial seven days of production," said Harold Hamm, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for Continental Resources. "We are very pleased with these results. This is our first well designed to test the theory that the Three Forks/Sanish formation may be a separate oil-producing reservoir not drained by a horizontal completion in the Middle Bakken zone above it."

Continental is the largest leaseholder in the Bakken Shale play, with 490,000 acres in North Dakota and Montana. The majority of its acreage runs north-to-south along the crest of the Nesson Anticline in North Dakota. The Bice 1-29H is located in the southern part of the anticline, where the top of the Three Forks/Sanish formation lies approximately 50 feet beneath the upper portion of the Middle Bakken zone. The Company plans to drill additional wells in the coming months to further test the potential for the Three Forks/Sanish formation to add incremental reserves to the play.

On April 10, 2008 the U.S. Geological Survey published a new assessment of undiscovered, technically recoverable crude oil in the North Dakota and Montana Bakken Shale Play, estimating that 3 billion to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered crude oil are technically recoverable with currently available technology and industry practices. This was a 25-fold increase over the previous USGS assessment, published in 1995. The 2008 estimate made the Bakken the largest continuous oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS in the lower 48 states.