Siverston Field lies in McKenzie County, North Dakota, in the deep, overpressured core of the Williston Basin where the Bakken and Three Forks are at their most productive. Like most administrative fields designated during the horizontal boom, it has no conventional history to speak of: the acreage was drilled for the first time with long-lateral Middle Bakken wells beginning around 2008 and later with Three Forks wells beneath them. Mineral owners here hold a straightforward shale interest with the sharp decline profile that implies.
Little of the acreage that became Siverston Field had been productive before the shale era. McKenzie County had long conventional production along the Nesson Anticline to the north and east, but the deeper interior of the county saw comparatively little drilling until the Bakken was proven commercial. Once the Mountrail County results were public, operators moved into the deep basin quickly, and the North Dakota Industrial Commission designated new administrative fields to accompany the spacing units being created.
Development ran in waves tied to the oil price, pausing in 2015 and 2020 and resuming afterward. Well design changed substantially across that span — laterals lengthened toward two miles and beyond, stage counts rose sharply, and proppant volumes multiplied several times over. As a result, a single Siverston spacing unit can contain a 2010 well drilled with an early completion design and a much stronger recent well producing from the same rock a few hundred feet away.
Operatorship across the area has moved with the broader consolidation of the Williston Basin, including the 2022 combination of Whiting Petroleum and Oasis Petroleum into Chord Energy and Chord’s combination with Enerplus in 2024. Mineral owners should treat operator changes on division orders and check stubs as routine corporate housekeeping. Neither the decimal interest nor the underlying lease terms change because a different company took over the wells.
Siverston sits in the deep core of the Williston Basin, where the Bakken petroleum system lies at roughly 10,000 to 11,000 feet and carries substantial overpressure. The Middle Bakken is a tight dolomitic siltstone with essentially no natural permeability, bounded above and below by the organic-rich shales that generated its oil. Beneath it, the Three Forks Formation contributes multiple dolomite benches that drain separately. That stacked productive section is why core McKenzie County tracts support so many wells over the full life of development.
Siverston has no injection program. Additional recovery in the Bakken comes from adding wellbores rather than adding fluid: infill wells between the originals, deeper Three Forks benches, longer laterals, and refracs of early completions that used a small fraction of modern proppant volumes. The recovery factor stays low relative to conventional reservoirs no matter how well a single well performs, which is the structural reason drilling continues wherever undeveloped locations remain.
Value in Siverston Field rests on remaining locations far more than on existing production, because wells already on line have delivered most of what they will ever pay. Spacing units of 1,280 acres are typical, so even a small net mineral acre position can be exposed to a number of wells. Interests in core McKenzie County acreage draw competing solicitations, and offers vary widely with how each buyer models inventory. 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:
Most of this part of McKenzie County was never commercially productive before horizontal drilling. The conventional Williston fields cluster along structures like the Nesson Anticline, and the deep basin interior held oil only in rock that could not flow without hydraulic fracturing. Your tract likely produced for the first time after 2008.
Wells are allocated to a defined unit, and each mineral owner in that unit shares production in proportion to their net mineral acres. A 1,280-acre unit spanning two sections is standard in the Bakken. Your decimal reflects your acreage in the unit multiplied by your royalty rate, not the wellbore path itself.
A sharp early drop is expected in the Bakken and is not by itself a sign of a problem. Wells lose most of their opening rate within the first year or two and then settle into a long, low-rate tail. Persistent zero-production months are different and worth asking your operator about directly.