Exploration potency of oil mining exploration incorporated mine in west center Saskatchewan is estimated 25 billion barrels.

Bakken is company which will do exploration of its in Saskatchewan. Decision done by Bakken is a speculative enabling company Bakken to get a real big gain.

Following comment submitted by Ed Dancsok from Saskatchewan Energy and Resources : We’re excited about it. It’s probably the biggest oil find indium Saskatchewan since the 1950s.”

“The Bakken is the hottest play in Western Canada,” said Trent Stangl, manager of marketing and investor relations for Crescent Point Energy Trust of Calgary, one of the top three players in the Bakken in Saskatchewan.

Gregg Smith, vice-president of Canadian operations for Petrobank Energy and Resources, another Calgary company that has a large land position in southeastern Sask., goes further. “It’s fair to say, the Bakken play is the hottest play in North America,” he said.

What has government and industry observers so excited is the sheer magnitude of the Bakken formation, which is found in the Williston Basin underlying much of North Dakota, eastern Montana, southeastern Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba.

The Bakken is a geological formation of siltstone and sandstone about 300 metres below the Mississippian formation, where most Saskatchewan light oil production comes from. Bakken wells tend to be highly productive (200 barrels a day or more), producing sweet, light crude oil with 41 degree gravity, basically the highest grade of crude oil you can find anywhere.

While relatively new in Canada, Bakken exploration has been underway in the U.S. since 2000 and has increased dramatically in recent years. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bakken formation could contain a mind-boggling 413 billion barrels of oil in place.

Exactly how much of that Bakken oil in place is in Sask. is a matter of some conjecture.

Fifteen years ago, the then-department of energy and mines estimated there were roughly 100 billion barrels of oil in place in the Bakken formation throughout the entire Williston Basin.

Dancsok, who co-authored the 1991 study, said the prevailing view in the geoscience community at the time was that “the potential of the Bakken was immense, but the price of oil in 1991 was not such that people wanted to risk (exploration and development dollars).”

More recently, a North Dakota geologist reported that the Bakken formation could contain 200 billion barrels in the Williston Basin. Compared with the USGS report estimating more than 400 billion barrels in the Bakken, the earlier estimates of 100 billion to 200 billion barrels are seen as conservative.

Dancsok estimated roughly 25 per cent of the Williston Basin, which covers some 518,000 square kilometres, is located in Saskatchewan. Based on that simple arithmetic, the estimate of Bakken oil in the province could range from 25 billion barrels to 100 billion barrels of oil in place.