Hess Spending $1.8B In The Bakken In 2011

Hess has been saying the same things about their Bakken program for the last few quarterly calls, basically they are using dual laterals that cost upwards of $10MM a piece and EUR about 500 MBOE per lateral. This latest call, however, had a few extra tidbits which I’ll talk about a little further down. First, in case you have not been following Hess for the past few months, you need to get up to speed on a few acquisitions.

Hess bought American Oil and Gas and TRZ Energy last quarter. The American acquisition boosted their Bakken acreage by 85,000 net acres and the TRZ acquisition by 167,000 net acres. Both acreages are near their exisiting Bakken position which now totals > 900,000 net acres. Below is a Drillinginfo map showing recent producing wells from Hess, American, TRZ, EOG and Continental. I included EOG and Continental because they are two of the top operators in the area and give some perspective. The wells are bubbled by maximum monthly oil, the larger bubbles indicate more oil production.

Hess discussed well costs of $7-$7.5MM per single and $11-$11.5 per dual lateral. They have been fracking with 18 stages but have moved on to 22 stages currently. Their current 30-day IPs are 400-500 BOPD and Hess averages about 67% WI. They plan to double production in 2011 by averaging 18 operated rigs 40 MBOEPD.

I realize this is a Bakken blog but I want to talk some about their international unconventional activity. Hess has teamed up with Toreador Resources to explore the Paris Basin. They will spud by the end of 1Q and drill 6 exploratory wells in 2011. They will also begin drilling in the Daqing Field in China with Sinopec exploring unconventional targets.