USGS National and Global Oil and Gas Assessment Project—Northwest Montana Bakken Formation: Assessment Unit Boundaries, Assessment Input Data, and Fact Sheet Data Tables

This data release contains the boundaries of assessment units and input data for the assessment of undiscovered continuous oil and gas resources in the Bakken formation of Northwest Montana. The Assessment Unit is the fundamental unit used in the National Assessment Project for the assessment of undiscovered oil and gas resources. The Assessment Unit is defined within the context of the higher-level Total Petroleum System. The Assessment Unit is shown herein as a geographic boundary interpreted, defined, and mapped by the geologist responsible for the province and incorporates a set of known or postulated oil and (or) gas accumulations sharing similar geologic, geographic, and temporal properties within the Total Petroleum System, such as source rock, timing, migration pathways, trapping mechanism, and hydrocarbon type. The Assessment Unit boundary is defined geologically as the limits of the geologic elements that define the Assessment Unit, such as reservoir rock, geologic structures, source rock, and seal lithologies. The only exceptions to this are Assessment Units that border a Federal-State water boundary. In these cases, the Federal-State water boundary forms part of the Assessment Unit boundary. In addition to the shapefile, for U.S. assessments, allocation tables are provided that enumerate percentages assigned to various land categories. Machine-readable tables are also provided that contain the input and results for each assessment unit summarized in the USGS Fact Sheet. Methodology of assessments are documented in USGS Data Series 547 for continuous assessments (https://pubs.usgs.gov/ds/547) and USGS DDS69-D, Chapter 21 for conventional assessments (https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-069/dds-069-d/REPORTS/69_D_CH_21.pdf). See supplemental information for a detailed list of files included this data release.