Aug. 10--The Dallas-Fort Worth area and Canada's remote Horn River Basin are more than 2,300 miles apart, but there's nevertheless a significant new link between the two highly diverse regions.

Horn River, in a heavily forested area of northeast British Columbia where subzero temperatures are commonplace, is now drawing comparisons to North Texas' Barnett Shale, a hotbed of drilling activity recently cited as the biggest natural gas-producing field in the United States.

There's increasing talk that Horn River, scene of a budding natural gas play attracting major oil industry players, could become another Barnett Shale in terms of headline-making gas production. The two regions have very similar geologies, and both are "unconventional" gas plays requiring advanced horizontal drilling techniques and extensive hydraulic fracturing to make them economically attractive.

The key players involved in Horn River also have strong Metroplex connections. Among the companies staking out large Horn River leaseholds are Fort Worth-based Quicksilver Resources, Irving-based behemoth Exxon Mobil Corp. and Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy, which is the No. 1 gas producer in the Barnett Shale and has a 550-employee North Texas work force.

Horn River "has the potential to be one of North America's most significant new shale plays," said Rick Buterbaugh, Quicksilver's vice president for investor relations and corporate planning.

The 600-employee company, with 450 employees in Fort Worth, has about 127,000 net acres in the Horn River leased from the Canadian government. It has drilled two wells, but hasn't completed them. The completion process includes hydraulic fracturing, the high-pressure blasting of the underground rock layer with water and sand to allow gas to flow into a wellbore.

At Quicksilver's shareholder meeting in May, CEO Glenn Darden said Horn River has the potential to be "our next big, big project." Quicksilver estimates it can recover 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from its Barnett Shale properties. The company's Horn River Basin holdings appear capable of producing more than that, based on the company's substantial lease acreage there, Buterbaugh said.

Quicksilver's experience drilling in the Barnett Shale should prove valuable at Horn River, he said, because there appear to be "many similarities ... from a geological standpoint" between the two.

Energy companies estimate that a typical Barnett Shale well might yield 3 billion to 4 billion cubic feet of gas during its producing lifetime. But Houston-based Apache Corp., which has drilled at least 28 Horn River wells along with Canadian partner EnCana Corp., projects that some Horn River wells could recover 10 billion cubic feet.

In the Barnett Shale, early production rates of the biggest "monster" Barnett wells have been about 8 million to 10 million cubic feet of gas per day. Apache, however, said three of its Horn River wells "have been brought online at gross initial production rates of more than 16 million cubic feet per day" and were still producing 8 million to 10 million cubic feet daily after two to three weeks.

A July 10 report in The Wall Street Journal said Exxon Mobil officials, after drilling four Horn River test wells along with partner Imperial Oil, concluded that the basin's wells have the potential to produce 16 million to 18 million cubic feet per day.

Horn River has a "very thick" producing zone of 600 feet or more, said Brent Snyder, Devon Energy's exploration manager in the Canadian play.

With such a fat pay zone, Devon has been drilling twin sets of horizontal wells, "one on top of the other," with one penetrating the upper part of the shale and the other the lower part, Snyder said.

Devon, which has leased 153,000 acres at Horn River, is drilling wells vertically for 7,000 to 9,000 feet and extending some horizontal "laterals" more than 4,000 feet.

-----

To see more of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.star-telegram.com.

Copyright (c) 2009, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

XOM, DVN, KWK, NWS,

A service of YellowBrix, Inc.