Some people are born cynics; others come by their skepticism through years of enduring life's hard knocks. Other folks drift, buffeted by prevailing opinions and fashions. Then again, there are the individuals with a profound capacity to believe. Sidney J. Jansma Jr. is a deeply religious man. He is also an oil finder, president and chief executive officer of Wolverine Gas & Oil Corp. From the unlikely location of his office on the banks of the Grand River in western Michigan, Jansma directed Wolverine's tenacious efforts to drill a rank wildcat prospect in central Utah's thrust belt. The blockbuster discovery, which has validated and surpassed Wolverine's pre-drill visions, has opened a new petroleum province and conclusively put to rest the notion that there are no more elephants to be found onshore the U.S. The Kings Meadow Ranches #1-17 is the eye-popping discovery well for Covenant Field, Township 23s-1w, Sevier County, Utah. Completed in the spring of 2004, it encountered 487 feet of net oil pay in the Jurassic Navajo sandstone with an average porosity of 14%. There are 600 feet of closure above the oil/water contact on the structure, which spans 1,200 acres. The well was placed on production at a rate of 700 barrels of 40-degree-gravity oil per day; at present, nearly a year later, it is making 900 barrels a day. A confirmation has been successfully drilled and is producing, and two additional wells have been drilled and are waiting on completion. Ten wells will be needed to develop the field, which had already produced 265,000 barrels of oil between May 2004 and March 2005. The astonishing find was drilled in an area that had long tantalized and frustrated explorers. In the greater play area, 58 dry holes had been drilled prior to Wolverine's test; the nearest production was 45 miles east-southeast in Ferron Field in Emery County; and the closest correlative production lay nearly 150 miles away in northeast Utah. But who is this bold Wolverine? Actually, several oil companies have used Wolverine in their names, but Jansma's Wolverine is a reincarnation of a long-time Michigan independent. The first Wolverine Gas & Oil was founded in Grand Rapids by Jansma's father in 1948, and the younger Jansma joined the family firm in 1966. The Jansmas led the company to good success in their Michigan backyard, mainly working the Antrim Shale and Prairie du Chien plays. The Jansma family merged Wolverine with Dominion Resources Inc. in 1996, and Jansma Jr. served as president of Dominion Midwest for the following four years. Eventually, he wanted to go back out on his own, and in 2000, he re-formed Wolverine Gas & Oil and persuaded Gary Bleeker to join him as chief operating officer and Sid Jansma III as vice president. Doug Strickland joined the firm as manager of exploration, Keith Johnson came onboard as manager of geophysics and John Vrona became manager of geology. The nascent company started looking at basins across the West, evaluating various opportunities. It started ventures in Wyoming's Green River, Big Horn and Wind River basins; Kansas' Cherokee Basin; and Texas' Fort Worth Basin. "Our hallmark for doing business is: get ahead of the crowd, think about something early, and go do it," says Jansma. One day Wolverine received a call about a prospect that Chevron was looking to unload. The Sevier prospect was not deep-the primary objective was Navajo at about 7,200 feet-and the structure, defined by 2-D seismic, was huge and unequivocal. Chevron had been working the idea off and on since the late 1950s, when it had gathered a group of leases and drilled an initial well. That test was dry, but the major was intrigued and kept the prospect alive for decades. It drilled a 17,400-foot test in 1981, which was also dry but which validated one of the key prospect concepts. It acquired some additional 2-D seismic in 1995, but in 2000 it finally decided to sell the acreage. Wolverine jumped at the chance. It bought the Utah deal from Chevron, including the leases and extensive geological data files, and it purchased rights to about 120 miles of seismic data. "Chevron didn't drill the prospect because it couldn't demonstrate a viable source," says Strickland, who had worked at Chevron earlier in his career and had years of thrust-belt experience. Jansma says, "I took the deal because I knew that we had the knowledge base to take a good shot at it." Building the deal The questions of source and timing of the structure were clearly the major issues, and Wolverine commissioned a Utah structural geologist, Daniel Schelling, and a geochemist, David Wavrek, to look more deeply into the problems. The pair completed an intensive, yearlong study that showed the Mississippian Manning Canyon and Chainman formations in northwest Utah could indeed have sourced Wolverine's feature. They also believed the company's prospect was likely in the natural gas window. Armed with this information, Wolverine took its show on the road. It rented a double booth at the 2002 NAPE prospect expo in Houston, and hung up cross-sections, banners and seismic to entice interest. At first, it was asking a standard third-for-a-quarter promote for the deal, which it was marketing as a gas prospect that could contain four trillion cubic feet. The little company had a sizeable investment in the prospect, but the structure was so alluring that it thought it would sell in a reasonable length of time. The prospect sat in the Sevier thrust, a section of the Rocky Mountain thrust belt that spans Idaho, Wyoming and Utah. In this regime, great thrust faults had carried sediments from the west up and over flat-lying beds in basins to the east. In the process, the beds above and below the thrusts were crumpled into convoluted and diverse structures. Too, there were several pulses of this tectonic activity, so multiple thrusts, stacked thrusts and back thrusts complicated the picture. What Wolverine was offering was a chance to drill an impressive four-way closure at a shallow depth. While the area in central Utah that Wolverine wanted to explore is closely related to the well-known Wyoming Overthrust Belt, it had some differences. One key feature was the presence of the Jurassic Arapien formation, a thick shale bed that deformed easily under stress. In Wolverine's prospect, the Arapien had been tectonically thickened and pushed into a large wedge that capped the prospective structure. At the surface, Wolverine had a triangle zone in the Arapien, with Cretaceous and Tertiary sediments coming up on either side. Beneath the thickened Arapien, Wolverine was targeting a structure with some 1,500 feet of closure that had been formed as a fault-bend fold of the frontal thrust plate. Chevron had drilled its 1981 deep well on the northwest flank of the structure, about 1,300 feet downdip of the crest. That well had seen 9,000 feet of Arapien and had intersected both the hanging wall and footwall sections of the thrust fault, encountering the Navajo in the hanging-wall section. "The Chevron well proved that the fault-bend fold was there," says Johnson. Time and again, however, companies would probe and study and poke at Wolverine's deal, but none would bite. People could see and agree to the structure, but the questions about source and the timing of the structure loomed too large. The Chevron well was both a help and a hindrance, because it hadn't seen any shows. "Typically the Navajo, which is the same as the Nugget in Wyoming, doesn't have shows," says Strickland. "We knew that you could be on a 40-acre offset below the water contact and not have shows." The company demonstrated that this occurred in a Wyoming Overthrust analog field, but the lack of shows remained hard for people to swallow. Wolverine didn't have much success selling the deal, so it went back to NAPE in 2003. It also attended the Prospect Exchange in Calgary. "We thought that the similarity of our prospect to those in the Canadian foothills would be an advantage in Calgary," says Johnson. "But that didn't work either.' The promote came steadily down as the number of show-and-tells increased. "We showed it everywhere," says Strickland. "We left maps and brochures all over." During the year and a half that Wolverine marketed the deal, it was turned down by 51 companies. "Over and over, we heard how great the story was and how nice the prospect was," says Jansma. "But no one would take it." Finally, Jansma decided that he had to call on his personal relationships. Wolverine committed to nearly 30%, and then sold pieces and parts on a straight-up deal. "We have 14 partners that have between 1.25% and 12.5%. Most of the people that finally took interests in the deal were friends of mine, and several of them were not in the oil industry at all," he says. Wolverine's working-interest partners include Winn Exploration, Penneco Oil, Miller Energy, Muskegon Development, Summit Petroleum, IBEX Resources, Salina One LLC, Rock Energy, Trendwell Exploration and Miller Exploration. "We're very appreciative toward the investors," says Strickland. "They invested and really hung in with us." Drilling the discovery Finally, the deal was sold. To protect its acreage position, Wolverine worked with the Bureau of Land Management to put together a federal unit encompassing about 66,000 acres in an area some 31 miles long by between four and five miles wide. "We found the federal regulators very helpful in putting this project together," says Jansma. "I showed them our seismic and our trend, and they helped us structure the unit in a way that we could live with." The BLM signed off on a unit agreement that called for three obligation wells, drilled at 18-month intervals, and Wolverine committed to drill the initial well by the end of 2003. Finding a rig was another challenge: "I tell people that I have a pair of khakis at home that have holes in the knees because I begged for a rig for so long," says Jansma. At last, Tulsa's Unit Drilling agreed to send its Rig #236 to the remote location. Wolverine spudded the $3.2-million, 9,000-foot wildcat in November 2003. Its original interpretation called for the well to drill out of the Arapien at about 7,000 feet. But on December 10, at a depth of 5,838 feet, Wolverine drilled into the Navajo and started to see oil shows. "We did not think this was a commercial deposit of oil. We thought it was a remnant, and we were excited because it meant we were right about the source," says Jansma. "We were still hoping for gas at 7,200 feet." The oil shows persisted to 6,400 feet. On December 23, Wolverine received the results of isotope tests that showed the oil was very similar to that in giant Rangely Field in Colorado. On December 24, it drilled out of the oil shows. "I realized that we had crossed the oil/water contact. I knew what we had at that point, and I told them to drill 200 more feet and log the well," says Jansma. The logs confirmed the unbelievable. What Wolverine had drilled was a duplex structure, with two Navajo sections present in the hanging wall. It had seen the seismic reflections of the upper structure at 5,800 feet, but it interpreted those as beds in the Arapien. The deeper structure it had targeted was wet, but the surprise feature above it was chock full of oil. It was an epic discovery, and it proved that the area had been sourced at the right time. Suddenly, many other structures scattered across this part of the Utah thrust belt were prospective. Wolverine wanted more leases. By early January 2004, Wolverine's land department, headed by Richard Moritz, had 22 lease-brokers working from an office in Richfield, Utah. In just a year's time, Wolverine has bought more than 400,000 acres in the trend outside of its federal unit, bringing its total holdings to nearly a half-million acres. And it has identified more than two dozen structures on those lands. More wells under way Wolverine completed the #17-1 well in May 2004 at the rate of 700 barrels of oil per day. "It was really hard to keep it quiet once we started hauling three tanker-loads a day of oil out of the location," says Jansma. The well now produces at 900 barrels per day; the 40 THORN-gravity crude has a pour point of -1 degree and contains very little gas. Half a mile south of the discovery, the company drilled the #17-2 Kings Meadow Ranches to 6,650 feet. That well is producing 700 barrels of oil per day, bringing field production to 1,600 barrels of oil and 160 barrels of water per day at present. In addition to confirming the Navajo find, the second well encountered a productive section in the Twin Creek, a fractured carbonate reservoir that overlies the Nugget. "We had oil almost to surface on a drillstem test of the Twin Creek, and this reservoir could potentially make several hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per well." To minimize environmental impact, Wolverine is developing Covenant Field via directional wells drilled from two pads, one on private and one on federal land. Currently, it has drilled the #17-3 and #17-4 wells, and is drilling the #17-5 from the first pad. Following that, it will drill the #17-6 and #8-1 from the same pad, then complete the wells after it moves the drilling rig. "We're going to drill the Navajo wells first, then we'll map the Twin Creek and decide where the hot spots are, and then go back and drill those." This fall, Wolverine plans to be producing 5,000 barrels per day from its first seven wells in Covenant Field. By the end of the year, it will also spud its second obligation well to test another structure in the federal unit. It plans to keep the rig it has under contract for a very long time. Naturally, the spectacular find has spurred a rush of leasing interest, and such companies as Pogo Producing, Petro-Hunt, Pioneer Oil & Gas, Yates Petroleum, Clayton Williams and Armstrong Resources are thought to be active in the play, the Rocky Mountain Oil Journal reports in a recent issue. Many more wells that are exciting will undoubtedly be drilled in central Utah during the next several years. And Wolverine, with its foresight to lease up key parts of the trend before even completing its discovery, will be the leading player. "Obviously, we're not as smart as some people might think we are. We were drilling a gas prospect at 7,200 feet, and we hit oil at 5,838 feet," says Jansma. "I know from Deuteronomy 8:18 that the ability to create wealth is a gift from God. That's why I named this discovery The Covenant Field."