Tri-Valley Corp (fka TVLYQ)

[jonesieatl]

Tri-Valley Sunrise Horizontal Well at Total Depth
Friday March 18, 4:20 pm ET


BAKERSFIELD, Calif., March 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Tri-Valley Oil & Gas Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of Tri-Valley Corporation (Amex: TIV - News), has reached total depth on its Sunrise-Mayel No. 2HR at 9,100 feet, including 3,000 feet of horizontal bore. The well will be logged today, then cased in preparation to hydraulically fracture the McClure Shale formation along the horizontal leg.
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The target is a natural gas rich zone that has little permeability to allow the gas to move to the bore hole at commercial rates. In industry parlance, it's called "tight." New technology is enabling more of these tight formations to yield their treasure and usually requires a combination of drilling horizontally to expose more of the zone to the well bore and then fracturing that zone lengthwise to provide more avenues of escape for the oil or gas.

While the country's hottest tight shale play, the Barnett Shale, can carry approximately one trillion cubic feet of gas per seven square miles, Tri-Valley's McClure Shale play posits approximately 2.25 trillion cubic feet in the same amount of area. Tri-Valley has mapped a closure of about 10 square miles on its Sunrise Natural Gas Project. However, the Barnett Shale, after years of experimentation to identify the means to commercially exploit it, is now heavily on line while Tri-Valley has yet to achieve commercial rates in its McClure Shale play. The hydraulic fracturing of the Sunrise-Mayel No. 2HR is an important step in the process of obtaining commercial status for its Sunrise discovery.

"Given the magnitude of the potential gas in place, there is every reason for Tri-Valley to pursue overcoming the engineering challenge presented in this discovery and we intend to persevere in this matter toward the ultimate reward we see in the Sunrise project," said F. Lynn Blystone, chief executive officer of TVOG.