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  4. Upper Three Forks

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- [Voiceover] The last part of the talk then I just want to switch gears and talk about the Three Forks since that's the play that's been evolving the last year and a half or so across the basin. I've stripped off all the Bakken producers, in this case, just the Three Forks production is shown, and I'm putting into the Three Forks everything that's in the Sanish or called Three Forks into this map. So all the orange dots then depict the last time that I updated this where the production was coming from. It's a dramatic number of wells that are now being produced from the Three Forks, and within a year or so, I expect the distribution of these orange dots to be quite significant across the basin and filling in a lot of the gaps in the white areas. The oldest production again comes from the Antelope field down in this particular area. We knew back in 1953 that the Sanish and Upper Three Forks was going to be a significant producer, but it's just right now, 2010, that this play is really kicking off in the Williston Basin. Overview of the Upper Three Forks, the Upper Three Forks has a number of facies within it. The deepest Upper Three Forks facies being a silty dolomite, highly deformed, brecciated. It's overlain by a silty dolomite, dolomitic siltstone, interbedded with green mud stone intervals. That's thought to be deposited in tidal flat. The Upper interval was thought to be mud flat to sub-environment. These two are then overlain by a burrowed dolomitic interval that's a sandy dolomite, and we interpret that to be deposited in the subtidal environment. The Sanish sandstone can sit on top of the Upper Three Forks as it does in part of the Antelope field, not all of the Antelope field. It's just very locally developed, only about six feet in thickness where it is, and it's fine-grained, burrowed, and it's dolomitic, actually very much resembles the burrowed dolomitic interval. It's in sharp contact with the Three Forks. It's also in sharp contact with the Lower Bakken shale. People have debated whether it belongs in the Bakken or the Three Forks. We're going to leave it in the Three Forks, and we map it as we do this burrowed dolomitic interval as being then part of the Upper Three Forks formation. So that's the way we will handle that aspect of it, but we're continuing to study that too. This just represents then a well that was drilled for the Bakken, but took a core through the Upper Three Forks interval in addition to that. So mineralogically, which is what I want it to represent on this particular slide, based on XRD data, you can see that the Upper Bakken consists of a silty dolostone interval, and where we get into the interbedded mudstone intervals, you can see the Illite, Chlorite content increase with some of those analyses. So overall then, the reservoir in the Upper Three Forks is a silty dolostone. As we get up into the Sanish member, it becomes quite a bit sandier, so a dolomitic sandstone in that particular case, the mineralogy then of the Upper Three Forks and Sanish. In terms of the facies that are present, work done by Brian Burwick in a Master�s of Science thesis at the Colorado School of Mines illustrating the various facies that are present in the Upper Three Forks. He designated some CDE facies, the C being this highly deformed brecciated interval purported to be deposited intertidal supertidal environments, the D interval, intertidal mud flat consisting of silty dolomites and interbedded green mudstone intervals, and those are then overlain either by a burrowed dolomite, sandy dolomite interval or this dolomitic sandstone interval that the name Sanish sometime is applied to. Sanish terminology is a little bit confusing in the sub-surface. It was originally used just for the sandstone on top of the Three Forks, but this productive interval was designated as the Sanish Pool by the North Dakota Industrial Commission, so sometimes people refer to all of this interval as the Sanish. We would prefer to call all of this interval the Upper Three Forks and perhaps use the word Sanish in a very restricted sense then. The deposition of the units then in this very shallow basin that exists on the North America continent and these tidal flats which cover tens of miles across the area. An Isopach map of the Upper Three Forks across the area illustrates just this Upper Three Forks interval ranges from zero to over 80 feet in thickness. Currently, we see production from the Upper Three Forks across much of the area, but generally, the thickness where we see that production ends up being anywhere from 50 to 20 feet in the overall thickness. We think that the production will cover a very large area. There's been recent activity in overall billings, the old fairway trend of the Bakken down in this area by Whiting an other companies, which is illustrating that the Three Forks has significant possibilities of production, and we see this play headed back into Montana currently. The question always comes up how big could the Three Forks play be. If we just look at what we envision as being the maturity areas of the Lower Bakken Shale, I think the Lower Bakken Shale's probably the primary source for the oil found within the Three Forks interval. You can see then that that covers an enormous area where the Lower Bakken Shale is mature. What one has to keep in mind, however, is the possibilities of migration occurring within the shale. So we could extend out of those limits too. Just a quick word on fracturing, and then I'm going to sum up. Think that we can have fractures caused by a variety of reasons, and we think that vertical fractures, horizontal partings, all play a role in the production in our Bakken interval. The open regional fractures appear to be these north, east, south, west trends. Most horizontal wells are drilled either north-south or northwest-southeast to encounter those regional fracture systems. To sum up this Bakken's and Three Forks' unconventional tight oil resource play is changing the name. Keep in mind it all starts with great source rocks covering a large regional extent, natural fracturing�s important, but the new technology, the horizontal drilling, fracture stimulation being the most important part.