North Dakota is on the precipice of winter and make no doubt it’s generally a harsh one. Just ask oilfield workers in the Williston Basin when dawn breaks below zero and their butt is on the clock. There’s much work to be done here for at least one of the basin’s largest producers, a pure player, which doesn’t believe the mighty Bakken is even close to revealing the last of its oil secrets. Not by a long shot.

Reese Energy Consulting today is following the latest news from Houston-based Chord Energy. Following last year’s $3.7 billion cash-and-stock acquisition of Enerplus and last month’s $500 million purchase of XTO’s Williston assets, Chord Energy now operates 1.3+ million net acres and 250 MBD in the Bakken, and it’s revealed a strategy to unlock billions of barrels of oil in untapped reserves. That strategy would be Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), which can recover oil from a field by 30% to 60%.

Chord in August submitted a proposal to N.D.’s Oil and Gas Research Council approved this month for a $13.98 million grant to test EOR techniques in the Bakken—the first pilot program of its kind. Chord will cover the bulk of the two-year program’s cost of $38.6 million and hold fast to its belief that the Bakken will soon evolve from shale pioneer to EOR frontier. Bundle up, guys.