Posted on 10/31/2009 3:34:19 PM PDT by george76
North Dakota sits on one of the largest pools of oil in North America.
The Bakken Shale Formation is estimated to hold nearly four billion barrels of oil that can be extracted.
And now, a new batch of oil just under the Bakken is adding even more interest to oil exploration in the state.
The Bakken Shale Formation has created excitement in western North Dakota - the kind of excitement that leads to things like bumper stickers. But even as oil companies scramble to tap into the Bakken, there's a new oil play brewing - it's called the Three Forks-Sanish Formation.
"As if the Bakken wasn't exciting enough, this just adds to it obviously."
"The Three Forks is a formation that sits immediately below the Bakken. And so it's really developed with similar technology to what we developed the Bakken with."
Wirth says Hess is treating it as evidence to support the company's expansion in North Dakota. Hess has doubled its workforce in the state to 300 in recent years. And others in the oil industry say Three Forks-Sanish could be another reason oil exploration in North Dakota will only continue to increase into the next decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at kxnet.com ...
North Dakota is the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the US.
My brother was talking about this a couple of years ago. He said they have a REAL hard time keeping folks on. Mainly due to the high wages they pay. The locals and drifters used to getting paid minimum wage think they are rich after a month of work and quit so they can enjoy their wealth. (I worked oil rigs over the summer in college. I too thought I was rich!)
It isn’t for everyone, but if you can commit to it while the boom is on you can make good money.
Wow! That’s enough to supply the USA for nearly 200 days!
But it would certainly help. A penny saved,... And the jobs would certainly help. IMO, drilling should be happening off of California and Florida, too, but the NIMBYs on those coasts own politics.
North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country.
If people would save / invest their money, then they would really help themselves.
Sad that it is asking too much for so many.
North Dakota has surpassed Louisiana as the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the nation.
North Dakota produced 6.38 million barrels of crude in May. That edged out Louisiana, which had 6.34 million barrels for the month.
I’m interested...what des the job entail and what sort of salary range?
Will the dimoKKKRATS put a halt to drilling for this new found oil?
Ditto that.
Ditto. Sounds interesting. Nothing’ much going on here in MI.
Ditto. Sounds interesting. Nothing’ much going on here in MI.
better get to it before china does <*|s off>
Check at the link, enter the maximum radius of 50 miles from and the zip codes for Williston (zip 58801), Dickinson (58601), New Town (58763), Beulah (58523), Minot (58701), Bowman (58623), Crosby (58730), which pretty much covers the Williston Basin.
There are a variety of jobs available, pay rates (and qualifications) vary.
If you are a class A truckdriver with hazmat, liquids, and doubles and winter driving experience, there are a number of outfits looking for crude oil and or bulk fuel haulers. (most Bakken oil is 'sweet', but on some non-Bakken locations, there is sour crude (contains H2S) and precautions and training will be needed for that --usually set up by the employer. If you have/have had it it is a plus.
Check out housing before making a move and get a place lined up. Be ready for the weather, anticipate extreme cold in winter with temps commonly reaching -30F or colder, depending on where you are, and wind speeds of 20 mph are common.
Not an offer of a job by me, but North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation.
This there seems to be opportunities there ( not just energy jobs ) . But do not go there without some reseacrh first. IMO
I’m ready to move there when the governor tells the Obamaloon and his flunkouts to shove his carbon up his Obama.
I’ll then turn up the heat during the winter with windows open, run the AC full up in the summer and plant a giant finger in the front yard with a sign daring any pimply, beta Harvard flunkouts to come into my yard and touch my SUV.
Oh, there’ll be a statue of the Obamaloon there for folks to piss on.
Wow! That's exactly the same argument used by the Democrats to keep us from drilling in ANWR! Seriously, what a stupid comment. Added to the 8 1/2 million barrels the United States already produces each day, this would be a handy supplement.
How long should a newly-discovered oil deposit support our entire usage before you would consider it worthy?
(I think it's a big deal, and we're pretty fired up about it... Eventually it could equal the Bakken, which is remarkable... and that is an understatement. That could literally double the potential we have — a Bakken 2, if you will.”)
It's a lot more than 200 days, more like 10 years or so.
It is less money for bombs and training for the religion of peace.
4.3 billion divided by 20 million barrels per day is 215 days.
Still well worth going after. It is many years worth of replacing Middle East Oil imports.
That is only about .06 barrels per person per day or about 10.1 quatrs per day per person!
Snopes has proclaimed this a fallicy. I would love to hear from someone in North Dakota to actually verify this.
We should be getting oil out of the ground everywhere we can from the Gulf to offshore N.W Alaska!
We know the Bakken holds hundreds of billions of barrels of hard to get at oil and the TFS under it should have about the same amount in rock that is easier to work with. I suspect, when all is said and done, the Bakken and The Three Forks-Spanish will come in at a lot more than the 4 to 8 billion barrels (recoverable) as has been predicted.
I said it first...11.5 billion in the Bakken and 9.4 in the TFS.
Go read that again. Snopes talks about the emails claiming 500 billion barrels or more being untrue. The 4.3 and subsequent lower three forks is real.
Bakken is cookin’
http://www.petroleumnews.com/pnads/504428032.shtml
Bakken shale making N.D. millionaires
http://www.petroleumnews.com/pnads/898762648.shtml
ND is now 4th biggest oil-producing state
http://www.bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/article_e2012bac-c3c8-11de-b354-001cc4c03286.html
Not quite that much. More like 5.2~5.3 MMBPD.
In the biz, folks don’t say BBL/Day
They say BOPD.
I do agree with MM for million.
Few understand these usages.
I had that figure in one spot and the 8MM as shown below in another.
8,457,000 bbl/day from American Energy Stats.
Be that as it may, approx. 8 bn barrels is a lot of oil. Add to that the Tiber and Kaskida fields in the Gulf and we're talking some serious oil on the horizon.
That cannot be just crude oil. That must also be counting Natural Gas liquids and other liquids that get sent to our refineries.
See chart at: Refinery Net Input
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_inpt2_dc_nus_mbblpd_m.htm
That cannot be just crude oil. That must also be counting Natural Gas liquids and other liquids that get sent to our refineries.
See chart at: Refinery Net Input
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_inpt2_dc_nus_mbblpd_m.htm
AMERICAN ENERGY STATS: Top Stats All Stats
View this page with: Just Stats Sources
Definitions
Both
Coal > Production
531,822,000 ton
[2nd of 65]
Coal consumption
1,060,000,000 [2nd of 41]
Commercial energy use
8,148.38 [8th of 119]
Electric power consumption > kWh
3,920,613,000,000 kWh
[1st of 132]
Electricity > Consumption
3,892,000,000,000 kWh
[1st of 210]
Gasoline prices
0.77 [102nd of 141]
Geothermal power use
5,640 [2nd of 53]
Natural gas > Consumption
652,900,000,000 cu m
[1st of 206]
Natural Gasoline > Production
12,275,000 ton
[1st of 21]
Nuclear electricity generation
780.1 terawatt-hours [2nd of 29]
Nuclear energy consumption
821.1 terawatt-hours [1st of 28]
Nuclear reactors operable
104 [2nd of 29]
Oil > Consumption
20,680,000 bbl/day
[1st of 212]
Oil > Exports
1,165,000 bbl/day
[16th of 184]
Oil > Production
8,457,000 bbl/day
[3rd of 212]
Oil imports > Net
10,400,000 barrels per day [1st of 21]
Oil reserves
22,450,000,000 barrels [14th of 97]
Usage per person
8.35 TOE per person [1st of 18]
Wall plugs > Voltage
110 V [201st of 209]
Wind energy installation
6,740 MW [3rd of 5
This spreadsheet didn’t transfer too well, sorry.
First good news I heard all week. Lets hope they can get things rolling, errrr... pumping.
If you want to see a more detailed breakdown, I recommend the following link that shows the oil production per state and which area offshore.
Crude Oil Production
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbblpd_m.htm
Any ballpark on the percentage of crude from:
Drip gases, and liquid hydrocarbons produced from tar sands, oil sands, gilsonite, and oil shale.
That is a problem with the oil industry - boom and bust. As a result, many experienced hands never return after a bust. It is too irregular. So when it booms they are always training new hands.
Just curious, because I am a geologist with 30 years experience in the Williston Basin, I have worked some 50 Bakken wells and a half-dozen Three Forks wells, and within the delineated maturity areas it is very real.
The Elm Coulee Field in Richland County, Montana is in the Bakken as well, and that one field doubled the oil production in Montana.
As frac techniques are developed, the North Dakota wells are coming in at better and better production rates, and rapid progress has been made in the Three Forks as well.
The oil has been there, (a scattered few vertical wells go back to the sixties) but it is only in the last ten years or so that the technology has been developed to extract it from the remainder of the formation in a cost-effective manner.
You’re right. I misread the first post and assumed it was talking about the over exaggerated EMail that has been going around. My Bad.
I know for years our shale oil reserves have been huge but extracting it was difficult and costly. It normally required heat injection, usually steam, and then the oil water separation.
What are they doing now?
If you think of it this way, the middle member of the Bakken is below the upper shale, or between the upper and lower shales where both are present.
It is the reservoir that a lot of the oil generated in the organic rich shale migrates to, and the Sanish/Three Forks is the closest best reservoir rock below the Lower Bakken Shale. Oil has migrated into that reservoir from the lower shale, and I have seen 'shows' of oil in samples from as far as 50 ft. below the Lower Bakken Shale Base.
Testing the formations in open hole (vertical wellbore) was a company hand's/geologist's nightmare. The minute you set the packers for a DST in the lower Lodgepole and opened the tool, the relief of hydrostatic pressure would virtually guarantee the shale would slough and either pack the tool off or stick it in the hole.
Even the suggestion to test the formation was grossly unpopular, and no one would run production casing through the interval without being interested in producing a formation below it, which usually took precedence to any testing the Bakken or Three Forks.
If that was done after deeper zones had been perforated, tested, and/or produced, there was a chance the cement job would prevent good perforations, and near wellbore fractures which are important permeability conduits would be sealed by the cement job on the production casing.
It was only after the successes of Headington, Lyco, and EOG in Montana that people were more willing to experiment, and thankfully I was in on the first horizontal Bakken well for one of those operators and a substantial number of wells afterward.
The ability to drill two miles sideways in the reservoir and induce fractures from that wellbore by hydrofracturing the formation makes the reserves producible.
Both the placement of the wellbore and the frac technique are important to optimize production, and the frac jobs are often (now) set up to be done in several stages, each targeting a specific portion of that lateral wellbore to ensure all the activity is not limited to the part of the formation which provides the least resistance.
As frac technology continues to advance, the recovery will continue to improve, and some wells have been re-fracced in the 10 or so years we have been drilling them to enhance production (because of the advancements).
In what is normally regarded as an 'oil shale', the oil is bound in the unconnected and extremely small pore space in the shale and commonly is cooked out, to break the rock and get the pores to interconnect so the oil can be recovered.
Thanks. I have better than a layman’s knowledge of the oil patch but I haven’t been around it for years. When they said the Bakkan was a shale formation I thought of the shale oil stories of long ago.
Ping for later read
How and when did they findout about 3 Forks, Sanish formation? Is it just seepage or is it its own formation?
Last, what are the chances of other established areas of production have formations deeper that have remained unknown?
True Vertical Depth (TVD) is generaly between 9500 and 10,500 ft., the actual length of the wellbore from surface around the curve section and to the end of the lateral can run over 20,000 ft. on a 1280 acre spacing, and there may be more than one lateral.
How and when did they findout about 3 Forks, Sanish formation?
The formation has been known since the 50's in the subsurface in ND.
The Sanish is named for a small town near New Town ND, where it was first found in the subsurface in vertical wells.
It has been produced in that area, and there is known Three Forks production in other parts of the Williston Basin, but it is uncommon (or was) in vertical wells.
Part of that may have been the difficulty in performing DSTs, part may have been an innate prejudice against it as a producer (the Three Forks, that is), and part because the gas shows from the lower Bakken Shale which were proportionally high in methane masked the ratio change between the Lower Shale and the Three Forks (the latter gas shows smaller in magnitude, but with higher proportions of ehtane through normal Butane--what the average mudlogger's chromatograph measured in the Basin in the day).
With the scale changes going on on old chart recorders and gas detectors, the difference was hard to catch, even if you were looking for it.
The lower and upper Bakken shales tend to slough, so looking for stray crumbs of sandstone in a tray full of black shale often presented a problem as well. If you looked for it, you could generaly find some show, but the location of the beds, proximate to the Bakken, made them difficult to test for the same reasons the Bakken is difficult to test in open hole.
Is it just seepage or is it its own formation?
It is its own formation, but aas commonly occurs, the origin of the oil is not the same stratum as the reservoir. Petroleum migrates, both up and down section, although up seems to be the preferred direction. It basically moves toward lower pore pressure. So while the oil in the Three Forks likely comes from the Bakken, it is a separate formation, and tests run on wellbores in both formations which were relatively close indicate the reservoirs in the Three Forks/Sanish and Middle Bakken are isolated from one another.
Last, what are the chances of other established areas of production have formations deeper that have remained unknown?
It would take extensive (unless one is lucky) review of existing well logs and mud log data to establish which relatively thin (2-8 ft.) beds out there are likely horizontal targets.
Many of those logs were done on velum by hand and will leave the researcher somewhat at the mercy of the individual who was compiling and hand plotting the data, but patterns of shows should emerge in any area with extensive, if apparently minor shows.
The shorter the duration of the show (the thinner the zone, and the faster it drilled), the more difficult it was to get a good chromatograph signature of the peak gas output, simply because most chromatographs in the field cycled on a four to five minute cycle.
The Nisku (Birdbear) is one such formation, and has potential on a more localized basis than the Bakken. I am sure others exist, which for one reason or another have not been produced.
I'd reexamine some shallower zones, namely the Tyler and the Heath as well.
The Tyler (especially at modern drill rates) would be tough to scout while drilling a wellbore today, the Heath as well, and the Heath typically had a heavy crude the consistency of peanut butter. Still, if an extensive area could be located, fireflooding (air injection) might prove a viable recovery method with the right drilling program and production strategy.
After figuring out where the potential lies (and I'm not saying these are all the possibilities), the only way to know is to cut a lateral and experiment with it.
The Williston Basin is tremedous for the number of different potential pay zones encountered before reaching basement rock, common pay horizons are the Ratcliffe, Mission Canyon, Bakken, Three Forks/Sanish, Nisku/Birdbear, Duperow, Interlake, Stonewall, Gunton, and Red RIver.
Less commonly productive or on a smaller (geographically) basis, are the Spearfish, Tyler, Heath, Kibbey, Charles (Poplar interval), Lodgepole, Souris River, Dawson Bay, Winnepegosis, Winnipeg, and Deadwood, (the latter two for natural gas). I even left out a few intervals (such as the Midale, Frobisher-Alida, and other subunits of the Missippian used in the very northern part of the Basin in the US), where there is an angular unconformity.
ehtane=ethane
I very much appreciate your detail, not that I understand it all, but I can gleen enough to draw a picture.
One last question. I your opinion have we in North American reached peak oil? That would be Mexico to the Artic and the coastal areas.
Obama and the Dims won’t allow any new drilling.
Is that peak oil as in the maximum of what we can physically produce from the planet (natural 'peak oil'), or the limits of what governmental entities will permit us to drill (artificial 'peak oil')?
Not the peak of what we can find, by any means.
Why?
Most of our continental shelf is virtually unexplored for oil and gas. For decades, as the technology for low 'environmental impact' drilling in offshore and sensitive environments has advanced by leaps and bounds, the prohibitions on drilling in these areas have increased, and not been eased.
Environmentalist ravings about Navy SONAR exercises show that geophysical surveys (which involve bouncing intense sound waves off subsurface--meaning below the surface of the ocean floor, not the water--strata boundaries) will likely be prohibited from any part of the shelf where whales have been seen.
Add in the over 50% of the US west of the Mississippi River in Government hands, much of which the oil industry is not permitted to look at, and when leases are let, they are subject to being revoked (which does not inspire confidence in the Government as a business associate) or require prohibitively expensive surveys and amenities in order to drill.
Areas designated "wilderness" or 'National Monument' are proscrbed 'forever', and the area from which we may draw our own resources is thus artificially limited by proclamation.
Is the oil there? (as in does it exist?): Entirely likely, but we can't say so if we haven't been allowed to find it. The geological situation is favorable, but the only way to have confirmed reserves is to drill a well.
NIMBY plays a part as offshore areas are prohibited because someone might see an oil rig in the distance, and a host of concerns are raised which are far more hype than not.
So Americans stand on the beach while Cuban offshore leases get drilled, and and while Governments unfriendly to the US are increasing their hegemony over areas which have established production or good potential.
No, I don't think we have reached peak oil, unless that peak is an artificial construct. I think there is a lot more out there and we are constantly developing the technological capabilities to produce an even greater fraction of what is present.
For now, I think the limiting factors are governmental, and not a question of whether there is more oil present.
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