Three Forks Raising Oil Optimism

North Dakota sits on one of the largest pools of oil in North America. The Bakken Shale Formation...  More »

North Dakota sits on one of the largest pools of oil in North America. The Bakken Shale Formation is estimated to hold nearly four billion barrels of oil that can be extracted. And now, a new batch of oil just under the Bakken is adding even more interest to oil exploration in the state. Jim Olson reports on the Three Forks-Sanish Formation. The Bakken Shale Formation has created excitement in western North Dakota - the kind of excitement that leads to things like bumper stickers. But even as oil companies scramble to tap into the Bakken, there's a new oil play brewing - it's called the Three Forks-Sanish Formation. (Jeff Wirth, Hess ND Manager) "As if the Bakken wasn't exciting enough, this just adds to it obviously." Jeff Wirth is Hess Corporation's North Dakota operations manager. He says the company is already probing the Three Forks-Sanish region. (Jeff Wirth, Hess ND Manager) "We've got on the order of half-a-dozen penetrations into the Three Forks in wells that are actively producing so we're incorporating the Three Forks into our Bakken development plan." Here's a map of the Bakken Formation - a stretch of shale rock holding billions of barrels of oil stretching from southern Canada into North Dakota. Geologists have been aware of the Bakken for decades, but higher oil prices of the past handfull of years and technological advances made getting that oil profitable. Then, new studies showed the Bakken is likely the second-largest oil reserve in the US - trailing only Alaska. Now, wells drilled by Hess and other major oil companies seem to show there another pool of black gold just underneath the Bakken - the Three Forks-Sanish Formation. (Jeff Wirth, Hess ND Manager) "The Three Forks is a formation that sits immediately below the Bakken. And so it's really developed with similar technology to what we developed the Bakken with." Wirth says Hess is treating it as evidence to support the company's expansion in North Dakota. Hess has doubled its workforce in the state to 300 in recent years. And others in the oil industry say Three Forks-Sanish could be another reason oil exploration in North Dakota will only continue to increase into the next decade. In Tioga, Jim Olson, KX News. North Dakota is the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the US, behind Texas, Alaska, and California.  « Less