The Bakken has come a long way from its early vertical days, as has other places like the Austin Chalk, now being once again developed for at least the fourth time.
The Bakken was never really a vertical target. It was noted on the way to somewhere else, always producing a show in the deeper basin, and, in places (up on the Nesson Anticline, one well on the Billings Nose, and a couple down in the Antelope Field) rarely produced early on.
Usually it was one of those shows people might give a shot if the Red River, Interlake, Duperow, Dawson Bay, Winnepegosis, and others didn't pan out, tested as they were plugging back.
Some of those vertical wells were plumb accidental (one I worked in 1980, for instance), where a vertical wellbore headed elsewhere (Duperow) cut some fractures in the Middle Bakken and came on, in the case I am most familiar with, like gangbusters. When you have to drill the rest of the well to the intended target underbalanced because the Bakken just won't quit, well, you make a well out of it. (IP 560,000 CFD and 70 bbls of condensate a day out of 4 ft. of perfs (done on the basis of my geological strip log, because the porosity throughout the wellbore was gas invaded). It was still going 10 years later and making enough gas to run its own Ajax.
Aside from those incidental producers, there was a flurry of activity trying to drill the shale horizontally during the mid to late 80s, which didn't generally work out so well. The shales are notorious for collapsing and other hijinks which leave tools downhole, and they just aren't the producer the Middle Bakken dolomite and clastics are (not much reservoir, unless they got out of zone and into the Middle Bakken or crossed fractures which hadn't healed with calcite and led down into the tight rock below).
That was abandoned, and the word was that few wells reached payout.
Then EOG and Lyco were sniffing around the Richland County Montana area, drilling single section spaced (640 acres) laterals in the Middle Bakken with invert mud, and getting a few hundred barrels a day, when I saw what they were looking at in a vertical well in what is now the edge of Elm Coulee Field, while working for another oil company.
That company came back and twinned the well, and drilled their first Bakken horizontal (in 2000), and in the years following, drilled another 150 or so wells in the field there before drilling a few in North Dakota. There was a lot of experimenting going on in the early days, and that was a lot of fun, but we ended up drilling with salt water, made hole faster, and after the frac, 1000 BOPD wells were not uncommon on a 640 spacing (single lateral).
They were bought out, but I was kept on as a wellsite consultant by the company who bought them out, emphasis shifted toNorth Dakota's side of the WIlliston Basin, and the company who subsequently bought them out kept me on, too, until the downturn in 2014, where the major decided they wanted to deal with larger consulting outfits and let those of us who pioneered the play go.
By then, (now 2014), the play was in full swing, well documented, and moving past exploring to development.
