STACK And SCOOP Push Mid-Continent Energy To New Heights

摘要

At 40,000 feet thick in its deepest portion, the Anadarko Basin in western Oklahoma presents one of the premier shale targets in North America. Newfield Exploration Co. opened the STACK (Sooner Trend Anadarko Canadian Kingfisher) play in 2013, shortly after Continental Resources Inc. announced its SCOOP (South Central Oklahoma Oil Province) discovery well in October 2012. Those two discoveries led to horizontal drilling and remarkable growth in Oklahoma oil production and reserves. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates Oklahoma's recoverable resource base had grown to 1.917 billion barrels by year-end 2017, more than double what it was only five years earlier, prior to the discovery of SCOOP and STACK. Now, an acquisition that brings with it a new completion strategy for the STACK and an aggressive new project in the SCOOP appears certain to make those numbers increase even more. Encana Corporation finalized its acquisition of Newfield in February. Steve Campbell, who previously served as senior vice president of Newfield, has changed companies, but not jobs, taking over as senior vice president of investor relations and communications for Encana. "The company got a lot bigger," he remarks. "We are close to being a 600,000 barrel-a-day company. We are by far the largest oil producer in Oklahoma." The acquisition of Newfield means Encana now has 365,000 acres in the Anadarko Basin, about 265,000 of which are in the STACK and another 90,000 acres are in the SCOOP.