Beaver Lodge Field in Williams County, North Dakota is the field that started it all. On April 4, 1951, Amerada Petroleum completed the Clarence Iverson No. 1 in a wheat field about eight miles south of Tioga, proving commercial oil in the Williston Basin for the first time. Seventy-five years later the field still produces, sustained by decades of waterflooding and by a later overlay of horizontal Bakken and Three Forks wells. For mineral owners, Beaver Lodge is an unusual case: a conventional legacy stream and a shale stream running under the same ground.
Amerada Petroleum began exploring the Williston Basin in the mid-1940s, mapping the Nesson Anticline over several years before selecting a location on the Clarence Iverson farm south of Tioga. The discovery well was completed in April 1951, producing from Devonian and Silurian carbonates several thousand feet down. It was the first commercial oil well in North Dakota, and it triggered a leasing rush so intense that by the mid-1950s the large majority of prospective acreage in the western part of the state was under lease.
Development of the Beaver Lodge structure proceeded through the 1950s across several stacked pools — the Devonian Duperow, the Silurian Interlake, and Madison carbonates above them. Amerada, later Amerada Hess and then Hess Corporation, remained the name most closely associated with the field. Waterflooding was introduced to maintain reservoir pressure and sweep oil toward producing wells, and it is the reason the field kept producing for decades after its natural drive would otherwise have run down.
Beginning in the late 2000s, the same acreage was drilled again — this time horizontally, for the Bakken and Three Forks intervals that lie above the old Devonian pays. That second life is common along the Nesson Anticline, where the historic conventional fields sit directly over the modern shale fairway. Mineral owners in the field may therefore receive royalties from both long-lived conventional waterflood wells and from far younger horizontal wells with a completely different production profile.
Beaver Lodge sits on the Nesson Anticline, a long north-south structural high that runs through Williams and McKenzie counties and traps oil in several formations at once. The original pays were the Devonian Duperow and the Silurian Interlake, both carbonates with genuine matrix porosity and permeability, overlain by Madison carbonates. Thousands of feet above them lies the Bakken petroleum system, which has no useful permeability at all and produces only from long horizontal wellbores and hydraulic fracturing. One tract can therefore sit over two entirely different kinds of reservoir.
The conventional pools at Beaver Lodge have been under waterflood since the field’s early decades. Injected water maintains reservoir pressure and pushes oil toward producing wells, and in carbonates like the Duperow it can lift ultimate recovery well above what primary depletion would deliver. That is why the field has produced continuously for more than seventy years. The horizontal Bakken and Three Forks wells drilled over the same acreage are not flooded at all; they depend on fracture stimulation and decline steeply by comparison.
Owners here often hold one interest that pays two very different ways. The conventional waterflood wells produce a modest but remarkably steady stream with a long history behind it; the horizontal Bakken wells pay heavily early and then fall away. A buyer prices those separately, and an offer that ignores either one is incomplete. Interests in a field this old are also frequently split among many heirs with gaps in the record title. We buy minerals and royalties in Williams County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
It was the first commercial one. Earlier wells had found shows, but the Iverson well, completed by Amerada Petroleum in April 1951 south of Tioga, was the discovery that proved the Williston Basin could produce oil in paying quantities and set off the state’s first drilling boom.
That depends entirely on your deed. Many mineral deeds convey all depths, but some are limited by formation or depth, and some estates were severed at different times. The instrument in your chain of title controls, which is why we read the deeds before quoting an interest in a stacked field like this one.
Because it comes from a waterflooded conventional reservoir. Injection maintains pressure and produces a slow, shallow decline measured over decades. A horizontal Bakken well has no such support and loses most of its rate within a few years. The two streams are valued very differently for exactly that reason.