Empire Petroleum re-entered a wellbore first drilled in 1959 and pushed it to 21,006 feet measured depth, or 20,949 feet true vertical depth, in the Fort Trinidad field in Madison County, Texas. The company announced the result on 16 August 2026 for the Wakefield-Harrison GU B #1 well.
After clearing and enlarging the old bore, Empire ran a full suite of open-hole logs and pulled sidewall cores from the section it had just opened up. The logs found hydrocarbons, both gas and liquids, through that section, with gas chromatograph readings spanning methane (C1) to heavier natural gas liquids (C4-plus).
Empire has not completed the well or run it through a production test, and it has not released a flow rate or an estimate of reserves or recoverable resources.
The field's earlier development reached about 10,000 feet. Empire's new depth reaches roughly 11,000 feet beyond that mark. Empire is using the results to guide development across two zone groups: the Intermediate Productive Zones, covering the Lower Glen Rose, Rodessa, James Lime, Pettet and Upper Travis Peak intervals, and the Deep Productive Zones, covering the Lower Travis Peak, Cotton Valley Sand, Bossier and Haynesville intervals.
Empire will use the logs and cores from this well to reprocess the 3D seismic data already covering its acreage position.
