Halliburton fracking info, week 20

Sometime in the last two weeks, Halliburton added a third state to its fracking fluids disclosure page: North Dakota joins Pennsylvania and (South) Texas. The three North Dakota formulations are:

• North Dakota Bakken Hybrid Formulation 1
• North Dakota Bakken Hybrid Formulation 2
• North Dakota Bakken Hybrid Formulation 3

As with the other formulations, Halliburton's pages list "additives," proprietary blends that play specific roles in the fracking process, and "components," the raw ingredients that make up the additives. Again, too, Halliburton is at pains to point out common and innocuous uses for each component.

A prefatory explanation to the formulations explains a little about why the region is being explored.

The Upper Devonian-lower Mississippian-age Bakken Formation, a relatively thin stratigraphic unit that covers a large portion (>200,000 mi2) of the Williston Basin, contains the largest oil accumulation in the contiguous 48 states. The Bakken Formation which is found only in the subsurface of the Williston Basin, ranges in depth from11,000 ft at the center of the Williston basin to just over 3,000 ft along its northern limit. The Williston Basin is located in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and North Dakota in the United States and Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada.

Discovered in 1951, the Bakken has seen aggressive growth in development activity in recent years with the successful application of advanced horizontal drilling, fracturing, and completions technologies.

The Wikipedia entry on the Bakken Formation has more details, including the history of how estimates of the recoverable amount of oil have changed just in the past five years. Presumably, the provable reserves of natural gas in the area are commensurately large.