The Upper Devonian Woodford Formation is an organic-rich petroleum source rock that extends throughout West Texas and southeastern New Mexico and currently is generating oil or gas in the subsurface. The Woodford is a potential hydrocarbon reservoir in areas where it is highly fractured; the most favorable drilling targets are fractured siltstone or chert beds in densely faulted regions such as the Central Basin Platform, southernmost Midland Basin, and parts of the Northwestern Shelf.

Since 1979, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has funded cooperative programs with coal-bearing states in an effort to provide current U.S. coal resource estimates that are calculated by uniform, computerized methods. As part of this program, near-surface lignite resources in Texas were estimated using the National Coal Resources Data System (NCRDS) and three software programs: PACER, VLATLONG, and GARNET. Resources of the aggregate coal in each borehole were calculated using the total-coal method.

The Sabine Arch is a large (1 2,000 mi2 [31,000 km2]), low-amplitude anticline centered on the Texas-Louisiana border. A basement-cored feature that formed in the Jurassic, the arch has been interpreted as (1) a Jurassic horst that persisted throughout the Cretaceous as a topographic relict of rifting, (2) a dome caused by deep-seated Cretaceous plutonism, and (3) a fold caused by regional tectonism. Using regional maps and cross sections derived from approximately 800 well logs, we outlined the depositional history of the arch region, thus documenting arch movement history.