A collection of facts and curiosities about the attention-getting Permian Basin, drawn from a variety of sources.
Increasing interest in the Permian Basin from entities and individuals outside our region has given rise to more reportage and analysis of our prolific play. We share with you a sampling from a couple of sources, as well as a background item from a bestselling nonfiction book.
A Place of Superlatives
The following is from “The Imperishable Permian Basin,” a report produced by the Independent Petroleum Association of America.
“The Permian region, in western Texas and extending into southeastern New Mexico, has been one of North America’s major oil and natural gas producing regions for nearly a century. What makes the Permian stand out, besides its size, is its huge diversity. Rather than a single play, it is a collection of regional conventional and unconventional plays, producing from a variety of geological formations covering a wide area and more than a dozen productive formations. Permian wells produce from depths ranging from a few hundred feet to tens of thousands of feet. While conventional exploration and production continues, horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing (in both vertical and horizontal wells) are growing forces in the region, opening up a new, more unconventional chapter…
“The Permian Basin covers a region roughly 250 miles wide and 300 miles long, representing an area covered by the Permian Sea some 250-300 million years ago. Some of its most prominent subsurface features are the Midland Basin in the northeast, the Delaware Basin in the southwest, and the Central Basin Platform in between. These areas contain the Wolfcamp formation, a shale that is 1,500-2,600 feet thick at a depth of roughly one to three miles. The overlying strata may differ between basins, but the Wolfcamp shale extends throughout most of the Permian, and is believed to be the source rock for oil and natural gas that has migrated over geologic time into the varied formations above. The roughly 7,000-10,000 feet of overlying formations contain untold numbers of structural and stratigraphic traps for oil and natural gas in many different zones, and thus many opportunities for conventional plays over the decades…
“One of the newest plays gaining attention is the Cline Shale, though at this stage, much remains uncertain. The Cline underlies the Wolfcamp in the Midland Basin and extends farther north and east across the Eastern Shelf, occupying an area about 70 miles wide and 140 miles long. The target zone for oil production ranges in thickness from about 200 to 500 feet. Some producers are developing it in combination with the Wolfcamp. While the potential technically recoverable reserves for the Cline are still uncertain, they could be extremely large, and with an API gravity around 40 degrees, a good quality crude can be expected.
“The Permian Basin also tells a story of the synergy between major and independent producers. The earlier days of the Permian were dominated by majors, but as the majors moved out from the 1970s through the 1990s to pursue opportunities abroad and offshore, the independents moved in to find new ways to keep the Permian productive…
“The Permian contrasts with plays such as the Bakken, Haynesville, or Fayetteville, due to its long history as a major, established producing region. Rather than being something totally new, the Permian’s long history is the story of an ‘old’ basin that has yet again been revived by new technologies, new geologic understanding, and new market environments. It is a story about combining the various talents of independents, majors, and service companies in using advancing technologies to sustain the lifespan of existing fields, to tap into zones that were previously uneconomic or inaccessible, and to increase the Permian’s proven reserves in a remarkable fashion.”
Find the full article at the IPAA’s website at http://oilindependents.org/the-imperishable-permian-basin.
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Sweet Spot
The following citation is from the Dallas Business Journal, from an article by Nicholas Sakelaris:
“The Spraberry Wolfcamp Shale play near Midland is by far the biggest oil field in the country and the second largest in the world, Pioneer Natural Resources officials told [DBJ] today. It’s bigger than the Bakken in North Dakota and bigger than the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas in terms of recoverable oil. Only the infamous Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia has more…
“‘What makes this area different is the various zones and the thickness of them,’ Tim Dove, president and chief operating officer of Irving-based Pioneer explained. Think of the Spraberry/Wolfcamp as a multilayer cake with different geological zones. Lay those zones out flat and you’ve got several million acres of productive shale play area.
“‘It’s more like 3 to 4 million acres if you think about it in 3D space, not 2D space,’ Dove said. ‘There is no other U.S. shale play that can say that. Especially considering we probably have 3,500 to 4,000 feet of shales.’
“Pioneer can drill 30 to 40 wells from the same pad site to different depths before turning them horizontally through six different stratas, each with its own characteristics. Pioneer currently has 26 rigs working in the Spraberry/Wolfcamp shale…”
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Origin of the Name “Permian”
Lastly, this is drawn from a bestselling nonfiction book of the past decade:
“Because the British were most active in the early years [of geology as a systematic science], British names are predominant in the geological lexicon. Devonian is of course from the English county of Devon. Cambrian comes from the Roman name for Wales, while Ordovician and Silurian recall ancient Welsh tribes, the Ordovices and Silures. But with the rise of geological prospecting elsewhere, names begin to creep in from all over. Jurassic refers to the Jurassic Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland. Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains. For Cretaceous (from the Latin for “chalk”) we are indebted to a Belgian geologist with the perky name of J.J. D’Omalius d’Halloy.”
—from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, (Broadway Books, New York, 2003), p. 72
“There will be no testing here, but if you are ever required to memorize them [geological eras], you might wish to remember John Wilford’s helpful advice to think of the eras (Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic) as seasons in a year and the periods (Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, etc.) as the months.”