Wildcats planned for southwest Iowa

Austin-based Chocolate Flats Petroleum Inc. will spud the first of two Forest City and Midcontinental Rift basin wildcats in August. The company has identified Pennsylvanian targets in the Iowa Shenendoah subbasin including Morrowan, Atokan, Desmoinesian, Missourian, and Virgilian. The company is drilling on four-way anticline horst and stratigraphic trap.

The wildcats are following an extensive 3-year geologic study, the company said. Chocolate Flats submitted plans for the wells in spring 2015, which were permitted by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources that same year.

The isolated graben-type filled depression of carbonates is in the shallow Paleozoic Silurian-Devonian Hunton petroleum trend whose northern two oil traps are represented by Falls City and Barada oil fields in Richardson County in southeastern Nebraska. There, initial oil production was 50-900 b/d of oil from 2,400 ft.