Searching for shale oil near El Paso

On the surface, the Orogrande Basin Prospect is unremarkable – an empty area of desert grasslands just east of El Paso, stretching from the Hueco Mountains to the Cornudas Mountains. But an oil and gas production company based in Plano, Texas is searching for oil there, and investors believe it has the potential to become one of the country’s next big shale-oil “plays.” Torchlight Energy Resources (Nasdaq: TRCH) recently acquired the 172,000-acre prospect in Hudspeth County and has announced plans to start drilling there early next year. “This is a game changer for Torchlight,” Willard McAndrew, the company’s chief operating officer, told El Paso Inc. The venture is speculative and rests largely on the research of Rich Masterson, a 62-year-old geologist who is credited with originating various shale-oil and gas plays in the Delaware Basin, east of the Guadalupe Mountains in Texas, where fracking technology has unlocked vast stores of oil and natural gas. Masterson’s research on the Orogrande Basin Prospect is founded on data collected by three test wells drilled in the area eight years ago. “I know there is oil in rock, know it is fairly thick and know there are different types of oil in various zones,” Masterson said. “What I don’t know is how easy it is going to be to get out of the ground.” Torchlight Energy will start drilling four new wells by the end of the first quarter of 2015 that will provide the data needed to answer that question, he said...more