Eastern Utah's Tavaputs Plateau defines desolation. Pavement and services are nonexistent, and the rutted, rocky roads that curl through the canyons and crawl to the top of the plateaus are viciously wearing on tires. This lonely country is a jumble of arid washes and sun-baked cliffs that have confounded travelers for centuries. It is a corner of the Beehive State famous mainly for its inaccessibility. And now it is also known as the site of Bill Barrett Corp.'s West Tavaputs discovery, a multi-pay find on an ample deep structure in Carbon County, Utah. The discovery, which is the recipient of Oil and Gas Investor's 2005 Excellence Award for Best Discovery, serves both as a testimony to perseverance and proof that company-maker fields can still be found onshore the U.S. The deep feature covers more than 4,800 acres and Barrett estimates it could contain recoverable reserves of 200- to 350 billion cubic feet of gas equivalent (Bcfe). Geologically, the area sits on the Garmesa Trend, an anticlinal trend that slices along the northeast side of the Uncomphagre Uplift that separates the Uinta and Paradox basins. In the 1960s and 70s, majors had swung through the region in their ceaseless hunt for large oil-bearing structures, and drilled a couple of deep tests. They encountered some natural gas-bearing zones, but the lack of access to markets and terrible commodity prices discouraged further activity. A bit of production was the culmination of years of sporadic drilling. For more on this, see the March issue of Oil and Gas Investor. For a subscription, call 713-993-9325, ext. 129.
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