The Wolfberry play in West Texas combines favorable geology with innovative completion practices to form one of the largest unconventional oil plays in the United States. Wolfberry wells produced almost 55 million barrels of oil in 2011, and that figure could double in a few years. In this report, the authors used wireline logs to correlate and map stratigraphic intervals and drill cores to characterize lithofacies and calibrate wireline logs for lithofacies identification and mapping beyond cored wells.

This report provides a detailed review of the stratigraphic and structural attributes and controls on productivity and future potential of the Cleveland Formation and Marmaton Group by integrating chronostratigraphic, depositional-facies, and play analysis. Its authors used a data set consisting of 1,127 wells and 5 conventional cores with ~250 ft of section from the Cleveland Formation, along with production data from more than 900 wells in the Cleveland and Marmaton.

This publication helps scientists quickly sort through the entire spectrum of knowledge of salt tectonics, isolate relevant information, and find pathways to more-detailed information. Included in the zip file is an interactive atlas of salt structures and associated sediment geometries that contains more than 1,300 annotated images of salt structures, with detailed captions that discuss key principles.