Incredible new shale play in West Texas:
If you haven’t heard of the Cline Shale, it is a monster: Lying roughly 1.8 miles below the surface of the Permian, the Cline runs about 140 miles from north to south and 70 miles wide. So it’s approximately 9,800 square miles in size.
Devon Energy was one of the first companies in the Cline Shale. A recent study from Devon estimated the Cline Shale contains 3.6 million barrels of recoverable oil per square mile.
Let’s do the math on that one: 9,800 sq. miles x 3,600,000 = 35 billion barrels of oil.
That’s a gross resource value of $3 trillion at today’s WTI price of $91 per barrel.
It’s a resource treasure for the United States, plain and simple. With Devon’s estimate of 3.6 million barrels per square mile, it exceeds the Bakken and Eagle Ford by nearly 50%.
The Eagle Ford pay zone is 20 to 35 feet thick; the Bakken is 10 to 25 feet thick… but the Cline is estimated to be anywhere from 200 to 550 feet thick. It’s enormous.
