Powder River Tight Oil Key Play

The Powder River Basin was historically driven by coal-bed methane and legacy production. But with nine horizontal reservoir targets (Frontier, Parkman, Turner, Teapot, Niobrara, Mowry, Muddy, Sussex and Shannon), the play has been under horizontal development since 2012. The PRB saw peak horizontal activity in 2014 before operators quickly halted exploration efforts during the downturn. Drilling reached an all-time low in 2016, followed by a four-year meteoric recovery brought production to a new high in Q1 2020. Since the pandemic, though, daily production volumes have plummeted back to where they were in 2015. In this Key Play report, we focus on the geological drivers that are shaping interest in the key reservoir targets, and what operators are doing to successfully target them.