Melrose, Louisiana; circ. 1952
Melrose in on the Cane River, SE of Shreveport. Its beautiful country with lots of very old, very fertile plantations along river bottoms. This area is out of the Haynesville shale gas fairway but there were a number of shallow Cretaceous aged carbonate fields in Natchitoches Parish in the 1950-1960s including some pretty good oil production that has since all pooped out.
This area is a little south of the famous Pine Island fractured chalk play of Northwest Louisiana where stage frac'ing was born and raised back in the 1950's. We used the same stage frac'ing methods in the Luling Branyon Field in Caldwell County Texas in the 1970's...perforate 30 feet in vertical Austin Chalk, frac that interval with up to 10 pound per gallon sand, cover the frac'ed interval with with rock salt (instead of frac plugs!), come up the hole, perforate and frac again; rinse and repeat until 150 feet of so of section was stimulated, then go back in and drill the salt out of the hole. Worked like a champ. Those shale kids thought they invented all that stage frac'ing stuff...phffftttttt.
Melrose is in an area of Louann salt piercements (salt domes), very few of which seemed to have trapped hydrocarbons in this part of Louisiana. The closest salt dome is called Chestnut and it had 2-3 wells drilled over the top of it in the 1920's by the old, Ohio Oil Company, all of them dry holes drilled to 2,000 feet or so.
Jax Beer is the National Beer of Louisiana, by the way. Or use to be. It's pretty good when it is cold enough to crack your teeth and partaken with a hot link of spicy Boudin, sold at this joint...I can almost guarantee, me.
