Delaware Basin Overview

What is the Delaware Basin ?

Delaware Basin Zones/Plays

• Yeso Trend
• Wolfcamp Shale
• Avalon Shale
• Bone Spring (1st, 2nd & 3rd )

The Delaware Basin is the western portion of the Permian Basin, separated from the more developed Midland Basin by the Central Basin Platform. The Delaware constitutes a roughly 10,000 square miles or 6.4 million acres extending from the southern New Mexico counties of Eddy, Lea and Chaves Counties southward into the western Texas counties of Culberson, Loving, Reeves, Ward and Jeff Davis.

Delaware Basin Stratigraphy

The Delaware Basin is a multi-stacked play, prospective for multiple stratigraphic layers. Though the majority of Delaware activity to date has focused on the emergent Bone Spring, areas where operators are currently active boast 5-7 potentially commercial zones across a median 3,000 - 3,500' vertical section. While the hydrocarbon mix varies across the intervals, most of them are significantly oil weighted and yield high-BTU gas. 

The Bone Spring formation includes the three Bone Spring sands and similarly named carbonate sections, as well as the Avalon Shale, that sit between the shallower Delaware Sands and the deeper Wolfcamp. The combined gross column of the Bone Spring formation has a median thickness of ~2,500-3,500', with the formation getting thicker and deeper as it heads east, until it disappears quickly into the Central Basin Platform.

Production has jumped 49% to 1.29 million barrels a day since 2007, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It may reach 2.3 million barrels a day by 2022, according to Bentek Energy LLC, an Evergreen, Colorado-based energy research firm.