Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). And our first question comes from the line of John Freeman with Raymond James; please proceed.
John Freeman - Raymond James
Good morning guys.
Jeffrey Hume
Good morning John.
John Freeman - Raymond James
First question I had, I’m trying to get a sense of how to think about the EURs at the end of this year in the Bakken. Last year they were booked at about 365,000 barrels, your reserve engineers have been historically really conservative, but we’re seeing seven production rates continue to trend higher. I’m trying to get a sense of kind of what you would expect that number to be, just a ballpark number?
Jeffrey Hume
John, I believe we’ll see the reserve engineers increasing that. We’ve internally, as we just announced, increased our model to 430,000 barrels of oil equivalent on average, and I believe we will see the reserve engineers getting close to that number on our recent results, the last six months in the North Dakota Bakken.
John Freeman - Raymond James
Okay, and then on the 439,000 acreage roughly that you had in North Dakota and when you did the test to determine that the three to four, at least on half of your acreage, you also believe that it’s a separate reservoir, is there plans to do additional tests on that acreage to further confirm that or you feel like it is good to go, half your acreage is going to be the separate reservoir.
Jeffrey Hume
Well, just as part of our plan we’ll continue to be doing testing just as far as the development. Internally we are very confident that we have separate reservoirs, we are seeing that with production from our very severe test at the Mathistad 1 and 2. We will have several wells and we’ll be drilling second wells either in the middle of Bakken offsetting a Three Forks well or a Three Forks well offsetting an existing middle Bakken in our drilling plan in the next six months. So we’ll continue to confirm our views on the fact that they are separate reservoirs and continue to prove that.
John Freeman - Raymond James
Okay, and then looking at the differentials for the quarter on the crude side, the crude differentials of 939 is almost the same as it was in the third quarter of ‘08, which was a little bit surprising to me. I understand obviously there is going to be more takeaway capacity coming next year, which you’ve laid out in those presentations on multiple occasions, but I am trying to get a sense of why that number was so high in the third quarter.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »



