Free Republic

Forty-seven Senate Republicans are signaling in an open letter to Iran and the White House that a deal over Tehran’s nuclear program will be at risk once President Obama leaves office. “It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system,” the senators wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Bloomberg. “Thus, we are writing to bring to your attention two features of our Constitution — the power to make binding international agreements and the different character of federal offices — which you should seriously...

Despite falling oil prices, production cutbacks and persistent safety concerns, rail officials plan to continue shipping millions of gallons of volatile crude oil from the Bakken region of North Dakota through Texas, according to updated records provided by state officials on Wednesday. Average weekly volumes reflect little change from a first batch of disclosures released last week. Those disclosures, dated last summer, provided a limited view of forecasted shipments. Volumes in Harris County remain the highest, an average topping out at six million gallons a week. Federal emergency orders — approved last spring after a series of fiery derailments involving...

Saudi Arabia and OPEC may have dropped oil prices to stifle production in the U.S. and other competing nations, but they didn’t drop it enough to stifle the U.S. oil and gas boom from fracking, a senior expert with McKinsey and Company said in Chicago. “If the Saudis think they’re going to put U.S. shale players out of business, they’re probably not, although there will be less drilling,” Joe Quoyeser told about 125 people, mostly graduate students, at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Energy Conference on Wednesday. ”But there are other elements of oil supply that are needed to balance the market...

STAGE one of Saudi Arabia’s plan—or perhaps hope—to restructure the oil market is taking longer than expected. By refusing to rein in production while prices fell, the Saudis permitted a big surplus to grow and served notice on higher-cost rivals (Russia, Venezuela, American shale-oil producers) that they would not prop up other people’s profit margins at the expense of their own market share. That signal has been weakened by the growing amount of oil in storage, which is absorbing most of the glut. World oil stocks rose about 265m barrels last year and Société Générale, a French bank, reckons they...

I have been supplied an Excel spreadsheet of all North Dakota wells back to 2006, thanks to Enno Peters and Dennis Coyne. I only used the data back to 2007 however. This is a wealth of information if we want to know how many wells came on line in a given month, we simply count them. We are given the monthly production data for each month. And since we have the monthly production data we can very easily figure the decline rate of each well, or any group of wells for any month or year. A note on the data....

BISMARCK – North Dakota’s House majority leader said Monday no apology is planned for the decision to stop a Muslim from delivering the chamber’s opening prayer on Ash Wednesday because some members wanted a Christian pastor to give the invocation. The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued a statement Friday calling on North Dakota Republican Party leaders to apologize to Dr. Nadim Koleilat, who ended up delivering the Senate prayer that day.

MINNEAPOLIS -- A Minnesota Muslim group is calling on North Dakota Republican leaders to apologize for un-inviting a Muslim leader from offering an invocation before the state House. "Lawmakers of any political persuasion should reject religious bigotry and exclusion," Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Minnesota chapter, said Friday in a statement. House Republican leaders said earlier they asked Nadim Koleilat not to participate on Ash Wednesday after some in Republican House members complained it was inappropriate. Koleilat, who leads the Bismarck Muslim Community Center, was asked by the state Senate to offer an invocation the...

BISMARCK – Republican leaders in the North Dakota House of Representatives said they canceled the opening prayer by a Muslim on Ash Wednesday because some members thought it was more appropriate to have a Christian deliver the invocation. Dr. Nadim Koleilat, board president of the Bismarck Muslim Community Center, ended up giving the invocation in the Senate instead of the House. Comments made on the District 24 Republicans’ Facebook page – including one posted Monday that called Koleilat’s planned appearances in the House on Wednesday and in the Senate next week “political correctness at its worst” – were brought to...

Since economies drive commodity prices, not the other way around, the collapse in oil is more of a demand issue than it appears, said Stephen Schork, founder and editor of The Schork Report newsletter. The influential oil analyst told CNBC on Friday that there's an "absolute glut" in crude, but the demand side of the equation can't be overlooked. "When you have such a sharp fall in commodity prices, that's because of economic demand. And I think that's a very worrisome telltale." "Oil prices are the canary in the coal mine," Schork said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "I don't...

Last month, a Nebraska Supreme Court decision approved a route for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline through the state. That decision effectively allowed TransCanada, the pipeline company, to begin issuing eminent domain papers to landowners in the way. But a fresh lawsuit brought by nearly 70 landowners has spurred a Nebraska judge to halt TransCanada’s eminent domain proceedings, the Huffington Post reported Thursday. “TransCanada sees the writing on the wall,” Jane Kleeb, director of Bold Nebraska, a group fighting the pipeline, said in a statement following the judge’s decision to issue an injunction. “Nebraska landowners are not going to cave...

Undaunted by the long battle over Keystone XL and current low oil prices, TransCanada Corp. is planning to build another border-crossing pipeline that would ferry North Dakota crude to refineries in Eastern Canada. TransCanada executives confirmed Friday they have signed contracts with shippers for enough capacity on the proposed 285-mile Upland pipeline to go forward with the project. It would move as many as 70,000 barrels a day of oil away from North Dakota’s Williston Basin, giving producers another alternative to shipping that crude by rail. “There is no question that production is up in North America, across the board,”...

Energy: Three million gallons of Bakken crude burning in rural West Virginia after an oil train derails in a snowstorm ought to underscore the environmental safety of replacing rail cars with the Keystone XL pipeline. One of the reasons President Obama says he'll veto the Keystone pipeline bill that, as a result of last November's GOP electoral gusher, has found its way to his desk is that it will only carry Canadian crude to foreign markets and is not worth jeopardizing the environment. Two things are wrong with that argument. The first is that Keystone XL will also bring Bakken...

As U.S. legislation to approve TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline waited Friday for a promised veto from U.S. President Barack Obama, the Calgary-based company said it would move ahead with another cross-border pipeline — this one to transport oil in the opposite direction. The $600-million, 460-kilometre Upland pipeline, first proposed in July 2014, has received the shipper support it requires to link multiple points in North Dakota to the proposed Energy East pipeline at Moosomin, Sask., TransCanada said Friday. The $12-billion Energy East pipeline would be an all-Canadian affair — an idea largely borne of frustrations with Washington’s interminable dithering...

A prostitution sting resulted in eight arrests Thursday night in Grand Forks. The Grand Forks Police Department conducted the operation by putting advertisements on Backpage.com, a classified advertising website. The arrests were made at a local hotel, according to Lt. Dwight Love of the Grand Forks Police Department. Love said the ad netted 30 to 40 responses. "Quite honestly, we could probably do it once a week for a while and get that many," he said. "We were pretty shocked by the level of responses we got."

BISMARCK -- Legislators continued their look at new bills to combat sex trafficking in North Dakota on Tuesday, taking up proposals to require school for "johns" and increased penalties for pimps that force abortions. Anti-trafficking groups are hoping for the adoption of a uniform trafficking law, increased penalties for sellers and buyers of commercial sex and significant resources for victims. Hearings on the package of bills began last week by the Senate Judiciary committee. Senate Bill 2332, from Sen. Mac Schneider, D-Grand Forks, goes after the demand for commercial sex, which many say creates the market for pimps. The bill...

Stimulus: Obama says jobs from the Keystone project aren't permanent and it's just one pipeline that will move foreign oil to foreign markets. But fixing the bridge he once used as a prop didn't create permanent jobs either. 'Let's set our sights above a single pipeline," the leader of the party of infrastructure told Congress in the State of the Union. But this Congress has 80 more Republicans than when he took office, and on Thursday the Senate rejected his admonition by a 62-36 vote. Eight Democrats crossed the aisle after a series of amendment votes, a process that had...

Union leaders called strikes on Sunday at nine U.S. refineries in a bid to pressure oil companies to agree to a new national contract covering workers at 63 plants. The walkouts, the first held in support of a nationwide pact since 1980, target plants that together account for more than 10 percent of U.S. refining capacity. The discord comes as plunging crude prices force oil companies to slash spending. Royal Dutch Shell, the lead industry negotiator, indicated talks had broken down. ... Shell activated a strike contingency plan at its sprawling joint venture refinery in Deer Park, Texas, to keep...

Horizontal Drilling and Hydraulic Fracturing, represent technology developed in the 1980’s, are responsible for extracting Shale Gas and Shale Oil [Unconventional Liquid Hydrocarbons] from previously non-productive shale formations about one mile below the surface. As this technology was applied throughout the USA environmental upsets occurred (e.g. well water contamination in Weis County TX and Methane leaks in Dimrock PA. Recent peer review studies [Cornel, Stanford, Duke, Texas University, Penn State University and Ohio State University] have shown that these incidents could have been avoided by maintaining proper well integrity. State regulatory agencies now require adherence to industry standards, to ensure...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Monday that both Nevada and Tennessee have joined the Lone Star state's challenge of President Obama's executive amnesty, bringing the total number of states fighting Obama's unilateral immigration policies to 26. “Texas is proud to lead a coalition that now includes a majority of the United States standing up against the President’s rogue actions,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement. “The momentum against the President's lawlessness continues to build with Tennessee and Nevada joining the effort to protect our states from the economic and public safety implications of illegal amnesty. As President...

Students who attend Catholic schools in North Dakota will carry the lead banner next week in the annual March for Life on the National Mall in Washington. More than 160 students from schools within the Bismarck Diocese will join their peers from Shanley High School in Fargo to lead a crowd expected to exceed 500,000 in the anti-abortion march, said Nick Emmel, a religious studies teacher at St. Mary's Central High School. While in Washington, students also will attend conferences, tour the monuments and visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he said. This is the second year students from...