Posted on 05/02/2010 9:58:16 AM PDT by Whenifhow
Very little has been written about the Bakken Formation and the rich oil reservoir just beneath it in western North Dakota. This recently discovered oil depository potentially holds 1.9 billion barrels in the Three Forks-Sanish formation.
For years, the oil industry have known about this oil field, but it was too costly to explore and the technology was not yet available. That is all changing now. The question is whether the EPA, environmentalists and our oppressive government will allow the exploration and harvesting of this tremendous resource that would greatly aid the US in their need for cheap, accessible energy and loosen our ties to the Middle East and other nations who hold us in a virtual energy stranglehold.
Snip
So the government will stall on this like they have done on all drilling efforts to appease the left-wing kook environmentalists in their ranks, while Americans run out of energy, pay massively rising energy costs and keep plummeting down the Depression-hole. I don’t know why we would expect anything different at this point. Certainly not fiscal and national sanity.
A very special thanks to Nancy Jacques for the tip…
Other news resources on this topic can be found here:
3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Technically Recoverable Oil Assessed in North Dakota and Montana’s Bakken Formation—25 Times More Than 1995 Estimate—
National Assessment of Oil and Gas Fact Sheet
FAQ’s about Bakken Formation
(Excerpt) Read more at noisyroom.net ...
Hmmm.... 4,000,000,000 divided by 20,000,000 comes out at 200. Nope, numbers are solid. How do you get more than 200 days of our nation's oil needs (20 million barrels a day) from 4 billion barrels?
And it's not like I'm anti-drill or anti-oil; just that I'm aware of the scale of the problem. In fact, we have 260+ YEARS of oil in our oil shale reserves; read the link for details about how we can get REAL energy independence in this nation (yes, that's my site).
In the real picture of things - big OR small - the Bakken formation is interesting, but really not all that much in terms of our needs or as a national strategic - or even significant - resource.
>Domestic energy production of all types is the ONLY thing that will keep America from going bankrupt. Energy production creates wealth, jobs and tax revenue.<
Seems to me like there are an unusual number of energy related disasters lately in a very short period of time.
Very curious.
The problem with this and all similar locations is the EROI, the energy return on investment. Simply put, the cost in energy to produce energy has to be high enough to make the expenditure worthwhile. That is why BP was drilling in the Gulf in a mile-deep area, drilling another 12,000 feet below that. The EROI was higher in the Gulf than in North Dakota. Ironically, Exxon-Mobile had shut down a similar operation due to the concern of its engineers over the underground pressures.
As much as we conservatives would like to think our energy problems are due to environmentalists, liberals, government, or foreign governments, the fact is that the world as a whole is running out of cheap energy. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that OPEC is flat out lying about their reserves.
After this spill we can forget about off-shore drilling and a lot of other environmentally sensitive options. This is worse than what happened in 1968 off the Santa Barbara coast, and that ended California off-shore drilling. It’s far worse than Three Mile Island, and that ended nuclear power plant construction.
That is a reason no new refineries are being built, and it has nothing to do with regulations. Oil companies know they will never need them.
Cheap oil is over. The faster we get a handle on that, the better it is going to be for our children and grandchildren. We have already saddled them with un-payable debts for Social Security, Medicare, and most recently our “stimulus” and Obama-care. Surely, we can lay the foundation for an energy future for them that does not involve $20 a gallon gas. That will mean changes in our land forms, the way we think about transportation, the reconstruction of a national rail system, and a new way to move freight, all without oil.
If we don’t do this and do it soon, we boomers will be the most cursed generation in history. And no one is going to care about left and right at that point.
Got a source for that 260 years of oil at $25 or less a barrel? USGS, IEA, EIA?
I’m an engineer who deals with facts. The facts are in geology reports, not on blogs. If such oil existed and was that easy to extract, do you not think that BP, Exxon-Mobile, Royal Dutch Shell, or others wouldn’t be paying off politicians as needed? Good grief, Obama himself just relaxed exploration rules for off-shore sites, and it blew up in his face.
We had the former CEO of Halliburton as the Vice-President for eight years. Why in the world would his boss in 2006 say that we were “addicted to oil” and propose alternative energy sources?
My uncle was an engineer who drilled gas wells for a living. We put up some hard earned money on what he said was the well site with the best potential he had ever seen in his career. It came up empty, along with our bank account.
Anyone who believes that all this oil is just sitting under our feet, or even better is renewing itself as we speak, needs to take their own money and start investing in drilling. After all, it’s a sure thing, isn’t it?
Check my link; it has multiple links that can be traced to reports from RAND, Halliburton, BP, Shell, Exxon, and other oil industry experts. We have 260+ years of 100% of our oil needs via oil shale, which can be recovered for somewhere between $16 and $30 per barrel, with equivalent processes used worldwide for around $21-$25 per barrel.
I’m an engineer that also deals in facts, and the facts are linked if you wish to follow them. There are trillions of barrels of oil locked up in our oil shale reserves, which can be recovered for considerably less cost than the spot market price for oil. That’s the find to concentrate on, something with the reserves to supply our needs for centuries, not a Bakken formation with a 7 month supply.
Ever hear of the Green River Formation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_River_Formation
Oil shale
The Green River Formation contains the largest oil shale deposits in the world. The 213 billion tons of oil shale contain an estimated 2.38 × 10¹¹ m³ (1.5 trillion US barrels) of shale oil.[10] That is 800 to 1 TRILLION barrels of recoverable oil with today’s tech.
http://ostseis.anl.gov/guide/oilshale/
U.S. demand for petroleum products is about 20 million barrels per day. If oil shale could be used to meet a quarter of that demand, the estimated 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from the Green River Formation would last for more than 400 years1.
^ USGS Scientific Investigations Report 2005–5294, Geology and Resources of Some World Oil-Shale Deposits
Devonian-Mississippian oil-shale resource: 400+ Billion barrels under Mississippi! It won’t be cheap to get but we have a LOT of oil!
http://geology.com/usgs/oil-shale/united-states-oil-shale.shtml
The criteria for the evaluation of the Devonian-Mississippian oil-shale resource used by Matthews and others (1980) were:
1. Organic carbon content: =10 weight percent
2. Overburden: =200 m
3. Stripping ratio: =2.5:1
4. Thickness of shale bed: =3 m
5. Open-pit mining and hydroretorting
On the basis of these criteria, the total Devonian- Mississippian shale oil resources were estimated to be 423 billion barrels (61 billion tons).
Less than one percent of the Bakken formation is recoverable with current technology, according to the USGS. That is far different from 260 years of reserves at $16 to $25 a barrel.
This is where all these debates break down. Someone forwards an email with a news article that seems to imply that some immense amount of usable crude oil is available right here in our back yard, at really cheap prices, and the only thing keeping us from it is those big, bad environmentalists.
Due diligence always reveals the rest of the story. Yes, some form of hydrocarbons are in fact here on this continent, probably somewhere in the amount estimated by the USGS. The kicker is always the extraction process.
Imagine you are sipping ice tea from a straw. It’s easy, and requires little effort. Now, switch to a milk shake; it still comes up the straw, but it takes more effort, and you have to stir the bottom with a spoon to melt it.
Now still that straw in a jar of honey. Huff and puff all you want; the honey is not coming up until you heat it sufficiently, right? That’s an oil shale formation.
Now take a coffee stirrer, a very narrow form of a straw, and try to suck the water out of a sponge. It’s tricky. You have to poke around, twist, and really strain just to get a few drops out. That is what the Bakken formation is like, porous rock with oil trapped in small pockets, all in a hetrogeneous environment for which we have no map.
Here is our dilemma, not such as Americans but as humans on the planet that God has entrusted to us. We do not have the technology to keep extracting oil in a business as usual fashion. Future generations may be able to get that oil, and they are going to need it. Meanwhile, we need to find some alternatives unless we are prepared to see a lot of people in poverty or dead.
Seventy percent of the oil in the United States is used for transportation, and 95 percent of our transportation depends on oil. A hundred years ago we had a transportation system that was the envy of the world, and it ran on coal. Oil production in this country peaked in 1970. Oil discovery in this country peaked in 1930. There’s a reason for that, and it doesn’t involve environmentalists, politicians, or any one else we can try to blame. The cheap, easy oil in America is long gone. The cheap, easy oil world-wide is going fast, and we are sitting on our hands.
We need oil for many things: fertilizer, plastics, tires, asphalt for pavement, even aspirin. We can’t feed the world without hydrocarbons. The U.S. Military has said in their March Joint Operating Environment report that the lack of investment in drilling means that we face a 10 million gallon per day shortfall in oil between 2012 and 2015. We can’t change that even if we start drilling tomorrow morning in any of these places where oil is supposed to be.
In the last 70 years we have built our subdivisions. strip malls, and highways like cheap oil was ours forever. We tore up the railroad tracks, boarded up main street, shipped our manufacturing overseas, wedded ourselves to cheap imports, and decided after all that to super-size it. All so we could get a $20 DVD player at our local big box store and put it in our Hummer.
Oil closed at $86 a barrel on Friday. After all the news from the Gulf this weekend, look for it to be $100 a barrel by this fall. Then maybe all these $25 a gallon wells will start appearing. The more likely case, though, is that the last rig will shut down with a trillion gallons still left in the ground. It will be no more recoverable than the oil on our driveways.
the fastest way to collapse demand for oil in the usa is to follow t boone pickens advice and convert US trucks and buses to natural gas of which the USA has 100 year supplies—courtesy of technology upgrades in the last couple years.
Natural gas is a good option for buses and trucks going within a city. There has to be a distribution facility available. Nonetheless, natural gas is one of those “all of the above” options that Governor Palin stresses. Hopefully, the new natural gas wells don’t keep running low in production after a year or two as some of them have done.
Pickens also jumped on the wind power bandwagon. That’s a tougher sell, as our electric grid is not good where the wind is, a lot is lost in distribution, and it is not a steady source like hydropower is. Solar has some of the same limitations and also uses a lot of rare metals controlled by unfriendly governments.
There is not going to be a single, simple answer or a smooth transition or an economic incentive like it was from wood to coal or coal to oil. That’s one reason we have to find ways to reduce vehicle miles of travel by building communities that combine residential with commercial and institutional, much like our cities of a 100 years ago were built. We might even find our communities stronger and more livable as a result.
my guess is that the oil shale will go into production with the next republican president. The way they’ll heat the shale in situ is with portable nuclear power plants.
The USA may be bankrupted in the mean time.
pickens recanted his wind energy investments and sold them off.
100 years worth of natural gas has been discovered in the lower 48 in the last 36 months or so. the discoveries have been so big that last I heard palin had thrown her lot in with the natural gas pipeline that went to the alaskan coast—so as to make alaska natural gas exportable— rather than down through canada for the US domestic market.
The real question: what does “technically recoverable” mean, and is it economically feasible?
The big problen with ITC was the energy demand. That is about to change with the introduction of portable Hyperion Power Generation System.
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Great graphics on what Shell is doing with in-situ
http://www-static.shell.com/static/innovation/downloads/innovation/news_publications/Underground%20Upgrading.pdf
They don’t have to strip mine to get at the oil bearing rocks!
pickens recanted his wind energy investments and sold them off.
100 years worth of natural gas has been discovered in the lower 48 in the last 36 months or so. the discoveries have been so big that last I heard palin had thrown her lot in with the pipeline that went to the alaskan coast—so as to make alaska gas exportable— rather than down through canada for the US domestic market.
I’ve seen estimates as high as 8 billion worth of recoverable oil in bakkan—but with US consumption at 12.5 million barrels@ day that’s still only a 2 year supply of oil. as of february Bakkan is currently was delivering 261,088 barrels@ day.
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