Posted on 04/11/2008 5:19:04 AM PDT by Kaslin
Crews looking for oil deposits last year in North Dakota. Now an area in the region is estimated to hold vast oil resources.
An area of shale and other rock in North Dakota and Montana is estimated to hold the largest potential oil resources in the 48 contiguous states, according to an assessment released Thursday by the United States Geological Survey.
The area, known as the Bakken Formation, might contain 3 billion to 4.3 billion barrels of oil that could be extracted using current technology, the survey said.
The United States had an estimated 21 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in 2006, according to the Energy Department. The new assessment by the Geological Survey could raise these reserves once drilling starts.
The survey reinforces what oil companies who have flocked to the region already knew: a boom is afoot. But geologists and industry officials alike cautioned that the number was simply an estimate, easily skewed higher or lower by technological advances or economic changes. If the price of oil drops, companies will not be willing to spend as much to extract it, and the Bakken Formation, which also extends into Canada, requires an expensive technique called horizontal drilling.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Next will be the article of how there’s some microscopic bug whose habitat will be compromised should we drill there.
“...requires an expensive technique called horizontal drilling.”
LOL...no doubt this is what the oil company flacks are telling the gullible NYT. Oil companies were doing horizontal drilling in old Texas oil fields 30 years ago when oil was $15/bbl., so it can’t be that expensive.
Thank God there are no visible moose in that picture or the Sierra Club would be trying to declare the Bakken field off limits to exploration.
Or if Clinton wins, the entire area will be declared a Federal Park and it will turn out the only other large untapped deposit is controlled by her major campaign contributer.
Can’t drill there. The buffalo, prairie dogs,____________ (fill in the blank).
President Bush recently signed an order that will allow drilling in the Berian Sea off the coast of Alaska. Soon thereafter, the leagl action started to prevent it because it may disrupt the habitat of some kind of Whale.
Its been identified as the Tennessee gilded pecker gnat.
“Oil companies were doing horizontal drilling in old Texas oil fields 30 years ago”
Yeah, for sure, especially when the adjacent property owners where not paying attention :)
I always heard that the magic number for pulling oil out of shale was $50 bbl. It’s now at $110, where the hell are these people now???
Ok...If we hang the Libtard suiciders, who we all know are going to fight this tooth and nail...How long will it take to drill it, and start pumping oil out to our refineries?
I find it interesting that this story appears in the Slimes...did they give up on attempting to conceal it? Does their slogan of “It’s not news until we say it is.” still apply?
The black speckled red headed wood sparrow’s nesting grounds are here!
Haven’t seen any black speckled red headed wood sparrows?
Then it’s an endangered species!
So we must put all this land off limits immediately!
Liberal eco-whacko “logic”....................
To Hell with the “environmentalists”, and the politicians who accept their support.
Oil has been flowing from this formation for a while. This is just a revised report on undiscovered, technically-recoverable oil.
Also, this is not produced like the Green River basin shale oil in Colorado. This oil requires no heat to release it. It does require some complicated horizontal drilling, fracturing, and completion technologies.
“Oil companies were doing horizontal drilling in old Texas oil fields 30 years ago when oil was $15/bbl., so it can’t be that expensive.”
LOL! Longer ago than that! My Uncle was a geologist for an American oil company when he lived in Midland. He was directing that kinda drilling. He lost his job when cheap arabian oil came online. Later, he worked for the government doing horizontal drilling in geothermal research. Oh! Wait! That must be why it (hor-drilling) became expensive! The government got involved!
Even with those hurdles you mentioned isn’t it still fiscally viable to start drilling for it now at $100 bbl??
I am not sure what it cost then, but the rig I am on averages about $60/minute, 24/7.
Seems a little spendy to me...
It is a bit more complicated drilling than this article implies.
Some basic descriptions available at:
Technology-Based Oil and Natural Gas Plays:
Shale Shock! Could There Be Billions in the Bakken?
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ftproot/features/ngshock.pdf
We have been drilling horizontal wells in the Middle Bakken since 2000. The USGS just finished their estimate of undiscovered reserves in the formation and released it yesterday.
As I said, oil is flowing from it now. They have been drilling it for years. It is the reason North Dakota’s oil production has been rising while nearly every other states production is falling.
It's endangered? All Right!!!
Montana, too. Elm Coulee Field was a big part of the state’s overall production last year.
And a few others have a trend up. But the majority are falling production rates.
Crude Oil Production by State
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbblpd_a.htm
I think that’s one of them now, b’golly.
Yep. Check Montana from 2002 onward, that is mostly the Elm Coulee (Middle Bakken) Field coming in...I’m working there now.
Thanks, BTW, for the link!
Or they will lease it out to China for 99 yrs.
We've got oil, we've got uranuium. What are we waiting for?
Our communist neighbors the serria will club us with their legal power and take away more national recourses.
So what? The Libs will never, ever, let us drill for it.
From the innumerable prairie dog colonies I see every time I go out west I wonder if there isn't a market in prairie dog meat. I wonder if anyone's ever roasted one on a spit. Mmmmm, prairie dog meat...the next great barbecue meat.
“Tennessee gilded pecker gnat”
hmmm, lots of modifiers to your noun, there.
Now, is the gnat’s pecker gilded?
Or does the gilded gnat like to peck things?
Or does the gilded gnat like to hang around peckers?
They still haven’t posted Dec 2007 numbers, but the rest of the past year is available by changing annual to monthly and see more recent trending.
Don't care about no moose. Looks like "pristine wilderness" to me. Just look at it. It's probably a "priceless" wilderness. Where else can you find stubble like that?
Isn’t 3-4 billion the low estimates their?
That’s true, but, that oil in Texas wasn’t 4,000 to 11,000 feet deep.
Bump for later.
Check out the habitat status of the prairie dog....
This is also the burial grounds for many native americans...
Our beloved, late Golden Retriever, Prior Lake Jake, hated those gnats...
Ah, damn, missed that one -
the gnats like to hang around gilded peckers.
To substantiate what you said, most conventional rig contractors in the field get $20,000 to $26,000 dollars per day, each well averaging between 45 to 60 days to drill. Add to that the cost of Consultants, engineers, geologists, and directional drillers, each taking a daily rate of $1500 per day up to $2000 per day. Add the additional blow-out prevention equipment costs, well casing, special drill pipe, MWD technicians, down-hole motors, drill bits starting at $65,000 apiece (PDC’s) and countless clean-up costs, the bottom line is phenomenal per well. (Do the math)
Those of you who believe that horizontal drilling was the same in Texas 30 years ago as it is now in the Dakotas, I have some Investment real estate I’ll sell you. Just because you research things so thoroughly and know so incredibly much about what you criticize.
Taking the upper upper estimate (4.3 bbl) for this reserve, if all technically recoverable crude in Bakken were recovered, it would cover US domestic demand for crude oil for all of seven months and 29 days.
Here’s the local flavor, from the Fargo Forum this morning:
It’s a gusher
Janell Cole
The Forum - 04/11/2008
State Capitol Bureau
Bismarck
The Bakken Formation in North Dakota and Montana has 3 billion to 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil, 25 times more than previously estimated, a federal agency said Thursday.
“This is the largest oil accumulation in the lower 48,” said U.S. Geological Survey scientist Brenda Pierce.
It is also the largest continuous oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. A continuous oil accumulation means oil dispersed throughout a geologic formation rather than existing as discrete localized occurrences, the USGS said.
The USGS estimated in 1995 that the Bakken had 151 million barrels of oil. But technology has evolved since then. For instance, horizontal drilling was not used in 1995 and now dominates wells drilling in the Bakken.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., was among state officials who pushed for an assessment of the Bakken. He said the report will not mean a dramatic change in national energy policy, nor will it result in the oil industry rushing into the state because the industry has already been exploring and producing from the Bakken.
“They already have a green light,” he said. But, “There is going to be a lot more attention paid to this country. … I think this will be big news nationally.”
Gov. John Hoeven said, “It demonstrates this can be a longstanding oil play.”
The USGS’s release of the Bakken report Thursday has been anticipated for several months and was awaited nationwide. News outlets that listened to a conference call with Dorgan including the New York Times. The Kansas City Star put the report’s impending release on its front page this week.
Dorgan said it might spur an expansion of the Mandan Tesoro refinery or give a push to efforts to build another refinery in the state.
The 3 billion to 4.3 billion figure is far less than the 400 billion to 500 billion barrels of Bakken oil estimated by now-deceased USGS scientist Leigh Price and the 200 billion to 300 billion barrels estimated by the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division two years ago.
But Dorgan and Hoeven noted that those estimates were of total oil in place, not total oil recoverable using current technology, which continues to evolve.
The Bakken is a rock formation named after a North Dakota landowner whose farm hosted the first Bakken well in the 1950s. It is the center, deeper part of the Williston Basin, which is North Dakota’s oil patch.
The Williston Basin underlies the western two-thirds of North Dakota, a large section of eastern Montana, northeastern South Dakota, southern Saskatchewan and a small piece of southwestern Manitoba. The Bakken formation underlies a smaller area limited largely to northwestern North Dakota, southern Saskatchewan and the very northeast corner of Montana.
Though the Bakken formation has been known for decades, “it has some hidden secrets” and has been a challenge to develop, USGS scientist Rich Pollastro said Thursday.
The USGS report notes that parts of the “resource base” leading up to the agency’s conclusion includes the lucrative Elm Coulee Field discovery in eastern Montana in 2006 and the “surprise (well) discovery at Parshall (N.D.),” plus the rising price of oil, which has reached $112 per barrel in recent days.
To put the new Bakken figures into context:
- The historical total of oil produced in North Dakota since its discovery in 1951 is about 1.6 billion barrels.
- Total U.S. crude oil production was 5.1 million barrels per day in July 2007.
- Nationwide, the oil industry has reported discovering 428 million barrels of new oil annually in the past 10 years.
The Bakken report released Thursday is part of an ongoing national assessment the USGS has been doing on oil reserves. Though the Bakken is now the lower 48 states’ largest oil accumulation, the agency continues to assess the nation’s oil deposits.
As scientists’ knowledge and technology evolve, the Bakken could be overtaken by another field, said Jon Kolak, associate coordinator of the USGS energy resources program.
Cole works for Forum Communications Co., which owns The Forum. She can be reached at (701) 224-0830 or forumcap@btinet.net
I was out there over Easter, and the drilling rigs are up and working.
We North Dakotans would rather have the jobs.
The prairie dogs are just targets.
NYT is way behind the news cycle power curve.
Me and the offspring in the Teddy Roosevelt National Wildlife Refuge, the heart of the Bakken.
Bison, some of the many critters roaming the Teddy.
If you stand on a high bluff in the TR, you can see for miles outside the boundaries, and there are drilling platforms and well heads as far as the eye can see.
“President Bush recently signed an order that will allow drilling in the Berian Sea off the coast of Alaska. Soon thereafter, the leagl action started to prevent it because it may disrupt the habitat of some kind of Whale.”
I have often wondered: President Bush has one guaranteed power that is specified in the Constitution - the Pardon Power.
Can he not use it to grant a Pardon to any or all companies who wish to drill in Anwar, or off-cost, or this newly-discovered Bakken field, exonerating them from any claim of civil or criminal damages, past, present or future?
In the early 80s decreased oil production due to the Iran/Iraq war drove oil prices way up.
There was a boom in drilling new wells.
The war ended, and a large portion of the production capacity from those two nations was restored.
However, people were saying that the demand for oil would just keep growing and growing, so oil companies kept drilling where they had started and brought lots of new capacity on line. They ended up with a huge amount of over-capacity.
The result was that the price of oil plummeted.
We have recently seen a ton of speculation on the price of oil that has driven it way up. Ten only years ago, oil had dropped to $10 a barrel.
Is the current price speculation on oil reasonable? Or is it the same kind of over speculation that caused the housing bubble?
If Iraq stabilizes and is able to increase production, how much more capacity is needed to meet demand?
If they create more capacity and drive down prices, the oil they pump from their current production capacity is worth less. Adding more capacity costs a huge investment, and could actually cost them more than it gains them in the short run if they create too much.
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