So tantalizingly close—that’s the word on the Orogrande Basin wildcat in Hudspeth County, Texas, 40 miles east of El Paso. This high desert ranch country is punctuated by volcanic intrusions and uplifts that give it a distinctly western landscape. Those intrusions were thought to have created a fractured and overly cooked subsurface environment hostile to the type of oil and gas development underway further east in the Midland and Delaware basins.

But in July, Plano, Texas-based Torchlight Energy Resources Inc. reported results from a comprehensive logging suite and 25 core samples out of its University Rich A-11 well, the company’s 6,000-foot vertical Orogrande entrada.

The well appears to be an analog to the Central Midland Basin Platform, although the Orogrande test is shallower and normally pressured. Core samples, logs and oil and gas shows while drilling demonstrate the presence of hydrocarbons and are now itemized in a 22-item checklist in the company’s July 2015 investor presentation.

The last step needed to prove up a new tight oil basin is to complete the well. Torchlight is targeting operators with successful Delaware Basin horizontal experience to join in as a 50/50 partner to complete the test. Torchlight offers 168,000 contiguous acres in the heart of the Orogrande and has executed a five-year drilling lease with a second five-year option with the state of Texas University Land System. Texas allows for single drilling and development units. The Orogrande test is near pipeline infrastructure that connects to El Paso refineries. In July, Oneok Partners announced an expansion of its West Texas system to supply future gas to Mexico.

Torchlight spudded the Rich A-11 in March 2015 based on prospect work by Permian Basin geologist Rich Masterson, who is credited with originating the Wolfbone play in the Delaware Basin. Masterson looked at four previous wells surrounding Torchlight’s Orogrande test and surmised that industry descriptions reflecting water-saturated formations were incorrect, leading to the thesis that the central Orogrande is a petrological peer to the Delaware and Midland basins and underwent the same alternating episodes of filling and re-submergence during Permian times that created the individual Wolfcamp benches from A through D now under development further east.

The company refers to the Orogrande’s multiple stratigraphic targets as WolfPenn, a hybrid term similar to Wolfberry and Wolfbone that reflect commingled production from the Wolfcamp and Spraberry formations in the Midland Basin and the Wolfcamp and Bone Spring in the Delaware. Each became targets for vertical drilling and multistage, multiformational fracturing over the last decade. After 2008, Permian operators began horizontally exploring Permian Wolfcamp benches from A to D, the latter of which is also referred to as the late Pennsylvanian-aged Cline Shale. Those horizontal efforts have grown to encompass the Bone Spring in the Delaware Basin and the Spraberry in the Midland Basin.

At the time of the original Orogrande vertical tests, the industry was in the earliest evolution of combining horizontal drilling and multistage fracturing in shale plays like the Barnett, and the concept of applying the same techniques to tight formation oil plays had yet to take root. Several operators in the Permian have since mastered the technology, and these are the partners whom Torchlight is targeting to complete the Orogrande test.

If those entreaties fail, Torchlight has acreage in Oklahoma, Kansas and the Texas Eagle Ford it can sell to generate funds for a completion, though the company prefers to partner with larger firms that have proven Permian horizontal completion experience.

The initial test was earmarked as a $1.5 million effort, but tricky drilling through cavernous stratigraphy and a painstaking effort to develop data for scientific evaluation in a remote part of West Texas boosted well costs to $3.5 million. Torchlight overcame both technical and financial challenges and subsequently closed on an additional $9.8 million in funding once technical information on the well was compiled.

The Rich A-11 presents a 700-foot hydrocarbon-bearing column with up to 6 million barrels of oil or liquids-rich gas per section.

History and geology appear to be in alignment for a new tight oil play. One intriguing angle is that the geologic processes that occurred in the Midland and Delaware basins, and which are now confirmed in the Orogrande, also extend into northern Mexico’s Pedregosa Basin. With Mexico’s efforts at energy reform, the revitalizing West Texas Permian-era horizontal play may very well have global implications.

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