The first time Denver-based Whiting Petroleum Corp. presented at one of Hart Energy’s conferences, its market cap was about $500 million. By May 2012, the company had grown to about $6 billion, “thanks to Hart’s spreading the word about Whiting,” joked chairman and chief executive, Jim Volker, as he addressed some 2,000 attendees at the recently held DUO 2012 Conference and Exhibition in Denver.

Whiting is all about finding unconventional oil and, it does that very well, as evidenced by its recent success. “We recently completed the highest rate Three-Forks well that has ever been drilled in the Sanish field,” said Volker. The well came in at more than 2,200 bbl. of oil equivalent (BOE) per day.

Elsewhere, Whiting has expanded its operations in the Niobrara shale play in Weld County, where it brought in a couple of wells at 400 BOE per day. In addition, the company drilled a horizontal well in the Wolfcamp, in Pecos County, which came in at 440 BOE per day.

“There are a great many opportunities facing us,” said Volker. “We have about 6,000 potential locations to be drilled horizontally for unconventional oil in the U.S. We are really going to get after it in the next couple of years.”

Today, Whiting is producing about 80,700 BOE per day, a 14 % increase, quarter-over-quarter, from fourth-quarter 2011 to first-quarter 2012, from its 700,000 net acres acquired at a weighted-average cost of $479 per acre. About 86% of its reserves are oil and 67% of its net daily production is from the Rocky Mountains.

“The other unconventional areas, including the Permian Basin and the enhanced oil recovery project we have in the Midcontinent, means all of our production, except about 5%, is designated as unconventional,” he said.

Going forward, Whiting plans to spend about 47% of its budget in the Rockies, with another 6% going into the Permian Basin. “We are really putting our money where our mouth is, with respect to unconventional oil plays,” says Volker. “This year, we plan to drill more than 250 wells, and almost all of them will be directed toward one sort of unconventional oil play or another.”

Whiting’s areas of interest include the Sanish-Parshall, Pronghorn, Lewis & Clark, Hidden Ranch, Tarpon, Starbuck, Missouri Breaks, Cassandra and Big Island, among others in North Dakota and Montana

“A few years ago we all wondered whether we would ever find a reservoir as good as the Middle Bakken and Sanish. Our geoscientists answered that question for us with a resounding ‘yes.’ One of our largest acreage positions, known as Pronghorn, looks every bit as good as our Sanish-Middle Bakken well,” he said.

“Overall, unconventional oil has done something for Whiting that is think is very difficult to do in this business, and that is to have great high margins. In our first quarter of this year, we set a new record with $74.17 per BOE net margin, which was 66% of our net BOE price.”

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