Charlson Field occupies the northeastern corner of McKenzie County, North Dakota, on anticlinal structures developed along the Nesson Anticline. Opened in 1952 with a Madison Group completion, it is one of the original Williston Basin fields and has since produced from an unusually wide range of formations — Madison, Nisku and Duperow, Interlake, Red River, and in the modern era the Middle Bakken and Three Forks. Few fields anywhere illustrate the stacked-pay character of the Nesson trend as completely as this one does.
Charlson was established in 1952 with a Madison Group completion, following on the heels of the Clarence Iverson discovery to the north. Amerada Hess drilled the Cora McKeen 1 in the field in 1953, and the company remained a fixture in the area for decades afterward. Development through the 1950s and 1960s worked down the section, finding pay in Devonian and Ordovician carbonates beneath the original Madison pools as operators tested deeper on the same structures.
Because the field sits on structural highs along the Nesson Anticline, each formation trapped oil independently, and the field accumulated a long list of separate pools with their own unitization, pressure history, and operating practice. Waterflooding was applied in several of the carbonate pools to sustain pressure. Texaco and later Hess were among the operators associated with different parts of the field, and unit boundaries here can be intricate as a result.
The horizontal era brought yet another layer. Operators including Petro-Hunt drilled Middle Bakken and Three Forks wells across the Charlson area beginning in the late 2000s, thousands of feet above the deeper conventional pays. The Three Forks in particular has been an active target here. Owners with mid-century interests in the field have watched it produce under primary depletion, under waterflood, and under horizontal fracturing — three distinct technologies on one tract.
Charlson sits on south-plunging anticlines developed along the Nesson Anticline, a structure that traps oil in formation after formation through the Williston section. Mississippian Madison carbonates were the original pay, with Devonian Nisku and Duperow, Silurian Interlake, and Ordovician Red River carbonates found beneath them. All of those are conventional reservoirs with real matrix porosity. Far above them lies the Bakken petroleum system, where the Middle Bakken and Three Forks produce only through horizontal wells and hydraulic fracturing.
Waterflooding has been used in the conventional carbonate pools at Charlson to maintain pressure and displace oil toward producing wells, which is why those pools have produced for more than seventy years. Different pools were unitized and flooded at different times, so their pressure histories and decline behavior vary across the field. The horizontal Bakken and Three Forks wells drilled over the same ground have no injection support at all and decline steeply from very high initial rates.
The defining feature of a Charlson interest is stacked pay: your tract may be productive from several formations at once, under different units, with different operators and different lease terms applying to each. That complexity is precisely why offers on interests here vary so much between buyers. It also means depth limitations in old deeds matter a great deal. We read the instruments before quoting. We buy minerals and royalties in McKenzie County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
Because different formations under your tract are developed as separate pools or units, and each can have its own operator. In a stacked field like Charlson it is common for a conventional carbonate unit and a horizontal Bakken spacing unit to cover the same surface acreage with different companies running them.
Not necessarily. Some mineral deeds convey all depths, while others are limited by formation or depth, and estates severed at different times can leave gaps. In a field with pay from the Madison down to the Red River and up in the Bakken, the exact language matters. We review the chain of title before making an offer.
They are valued separately. Long-lived waterflood production supports a modest, slowly declining stream; horizontal Bakken and Three Forks wells pay heavily early and then fall off, with remaining undrilled locations carrying much of the upside. A written offer should account for both, and ours explains how each part was weighed.