Unlocking the Tight Oil
Reservoirs of the Powder
River Basin, Wyoming

This project established a tight oil Field Laboratory in the PRB that would be used to characterize and overcome the technical challenges of developing large, emerging unconventional/shale oil formations - the Mowry Shale, Turner Sandstone, and later the Niobrara Formation.

The Project Team partnered with a leading operator in the PRB, Occidental Petroleum (Oxy), to gather geological, geomechanical, and stimulation data from wells in these unconventional formations. In addition to the primary objective, economically pursuing the tight oil reservoirs of the PRB necessitates addressing the technical issues currently limiting higher well performance and resource recovery. The Field Laboratory work in this project concentrated on optimizing hydraulic fracture stimulations, with an emphasis on multiple diagnostic technologies such as microseismic and reservoir modeling. These diagnostic technologies aided in establishing a stimulated reservoir volume (SRV) for the unconventional formations. In addition, with access to data from previously drilled tight oil wells, the study completed the objective to build the first data analytics laboratory (named the "flat file") in the PRB for unconventional resources.