Van Hook Field lies in Mountrail County, North Dakota along the eastern shoreline of Lake Sakakawea near New Town, just east of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation boundary. The name comes from a town that was relocated when the Garrison Dam flooded the Missouri River valley in the 1950s. As an oil field it belongs entirely to the horizontal era, developed with Middle Bakken and Three Forks wells beginning in 2008. It is core Bakken acreage, with the steep decline profile and deep undrilled inventory that description implies.
The Van Hook area has a complicated land history that predates oil entirely. The original townsite lay in the Missouri River bottomlands and was abandoned when Lake Sakakawea filled behind the Garrison Dam, with residents relocating to what became New Town. That process reshaped surface ownership across the region and left a patchwork of federal reservoir land, reservation land, and fee land that still influences how spacing units are assembled today.
Oil development arrived with the Bakken. After EOG proved the Middle Bakken commercially productive at Parshall in 2006, operators worked outward across Mountrail County, and the acreage that became Van Hook Field was drilled from roughly 2008 onward. Early wells were single-well spacing units with one-mile laterals; the field was later redeveloped with multi-well pads, two-mile laterals, and Three Forks tests beneath the original Middle Bakken wellbores, in the same sequence seen across the basin core.
Operator names on Van Hook wells have shifted repeatedly through basin consolidation, including the 2022 combination of Whiting Petroleum and Oasis Petroleum into Chord Energy and Chord’s combination with Enerplus in 2024. Because the field lies immediately adjacent to Fort Berthold, some spacing units in the area include tribal or allotted trust minerals administered through the Bureau of Indian Affairs alongside fee minerals, which affects how those units are leased and pooled but not the fee interests themselves.
Van Hook sits in the productive core of the Williston Basin, with the Bakken petroleum system at roughly 9,000 to 10,000 feet. The Middle Bakken is a tight dolomitic siltstone bounded by organic-rich shales that generated the oil trapped within it, and the Three Forks below contributes additional dolomite benches that drain separately from the Bakken above. Neither interval has meaningful natural permeability. Production depends entirely on long horizontal wellbores and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing to connect the wellbore to the rock.
No flood operates at Van Hook. Additional recovery in a Bakken field comes from more wellbores rather than injected fluid: infill wells between the originals, additional Three Forks benches, longer laterals, and refracs of early completions designed with a small fraction of today’s proppant. Recovery factors stay low compared with conventional reservoirs, which is exactly why the drilling never really stops in areas with remaining inventory. Gas injection pilots have been run in the basin without becoming standard practice.
A Van Hook interest is core Bakken acreage, and its value comes mostly from remaining locations rather than from the wells already on line. Because the field abuts Fort Berthold and includes land affected by the Garrison Dam takings, title here can be layered — fee minerals, federal interests, and trust interests can all appear near one another. We buy fee minerals and royalties only, and we do the title work at our expense. We buy minerals and royalties in Mountrail County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
The field lies in Mountrail County near the reservation boundary, and units in the area can include both fee minerals and reservation minerals. Whether a particular tract is fee or trust is determined by the land records, not by proximity. Trust and restricted interests are administered through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and are not something we purchase.
Royalty depends on your net mineral acres relative to the size of the spacing unit, your lease royalty rate, and which wells actually produce from your unit. Two neighbors with the same acreage can receive very different checks if one sits in a unit with four producing wells and the other in a unit with one.
Bakken wells commonly produce for decades, but at rates far below where they started. Most of a well’s cumulative oil arrives in its first several years. Long-term production continues at low volumes, which is why buyers weigh undrilled locations heavily when valuing an interest in a developed field.