Reunion Bay Field spans the Missouri River arm of Lake Sakakawea where Mountrail and McKenzie counties meet — squarely in the core of the North Dakota Bakken. Designated as development moved west and south from the Parshall and Sanish discoveries, the field has been drilled with horizontal Middle Bakken and Three Forks wells since the late 2000s. Its position across a major water body and across a county line makes title and unit configuration unusually complex here, which is worth understanding before you evaluate an interest or respond to an offer.
The area now covered by Reunion Bay Field saw little drilling before the shale era. Lake Sakakawea, impounded behind the Garrison Dam in the 1950s, covers a good deal of it, and the combination of federal reservoir land, reservation boundaries nearby, and split estates left the acreage lightly explored. Once horizontal Bakken wells proved commercial in Mountrail County, operators worked out how to reach the rock beneath the lake with long laterals drilled from upland pads, and development followed quickly.
Drilling accelerated through the early 2010s. Because surface locations near the lake are constrained, operators here leaned earlier than most on extended laterals and multi-well pads, drilling two-mile and in places longer wellbores to reach acreage that could not be accessed directly. That approach concentrated a great deal of production into a small number of surface sites and made spacing-unit design in the field more intricate than in flatter, drier parts of the basin.
Positions in and around Reunion Bay have moved through the same consolidation that reshaped the rest of the Williston Basin, including the 2022 combination of Whiting Petroleum and Oasis Petroleum into Chord Energy and Chord’s subsequent combination with Enerplus in 2024. Owners should expect operator names on division orders and check stubs to change periodically. Those changes reflect corporate transactions rather than any alteration of the mineral interest itself.
Reunion Bay sits in the deep, overpressured core of the Williston Basin, with the Bakken petroleum system at roughly 9,500 to 11,000 feet. The Middle Bakken is a tight dolomitic siltstone; the Three Forks beneath it contributes multiple dolomite benches that drain separately. Neither will flow at commercial rates without long horizontal wellbores and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing. The stacked productive section is the reason a single tract in this part of the basin can support a substantial number of wells over the life of development.
No waterflood or gas flood operates in Reunion Bay. Additional recovery in a Bakken field comes from drilling: infill wells between the originals, further Three Forks benches, longer laterals, and refracs of early completions that used a fraction of today’s proppant volumes. Recovery factors remain low relative to conventional reservoirs, which is precisely why operators keep adding wellbores rather than injecting fluid. Basin-wide gas injection pilots exist, but nothing comparable to a conventional flood is running in the field.
Interests here are core-area interests, but they come with complications: units that cross the Mountrail and McKenzie county line, tracts partly beneath Lake Sakakawea, and neighboring reservation and federal ownership that can affect how a unit is put together. Those factors do not reduce what the rock is worth — they simply mean title work matters more. We handle that work at our own expense. We buy minerals and royalties in Mountrail and McKenzie counties and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
Yes. Operators drill from upland surface locations and steer long horizontal laterals beneath the lake, so acreage under the water can be developed without a surface location on it. Ownership of minerals beneath the original riverbed has been the subject of litigation in North Dakota, which is one reason title review matters in this area.
Not by itself. Your royalty follows your net mineral acres inside each spacing unit and the unit allocation set by the state, regardless of which county the surface sits in. It does mean your records may be filed in two courthouses, which is something we check when we run title.
Start with your division orders, royalty check stubs, and any probate or deed records showing how the interest came to you. Those documents give the legal description and decimal interest we need. Send them over and we will identify the units involved and prepare a free written offer.