Posted on 12/09/2007 7:05:16 AM PST by saganite
The oil industry has known for decades that there was oil in North Dakota's Bakken Formation. But until recently, few thought it was worth chasing.
The Bakken, an immense blanket of rock that covers about 200,000 square miles, stretching from Saskatchewan to straddle western North Dakota and eastern Montana, has long frustrated efforts to extract its oil.
The oil was two miles down and trapped in tightly packed horizontal layers of shale that were easy to miss with conventional drilling.
By 1999, when oil prices were low, the industry had largely given up on North Dakota, recalls Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council: For the first time since the discovery of its oil in 1951, no oil rigs were drilling new wells anywhere in the state. "It was devastating," he said.
Fast forward to 2007. On the day before Thanksgiving, Ness counted 54 rigs in the field, almost half of them clustered around Parshall, a farming community of about 1,000 people 60 miles southwest of Minot.
The turnabout is due to a combination of factors: new discoveries, new technology that puts previously unattainable oil within reach and high oil prices that make the search for oil economically worthwhile.
The new curiosity about North Dakota oil was sparked last year, when an oil exploration company, Houston-based EOG Resources, revealed that a well it had drilled into an oil-rich layer of shale below Parshall is expected to produce 700,000 barrels of oil.
Now rigs are arriving almost weekly, and farmers with the right pieces of land can become millionaires just by selling their mineral rights and collecting royalties. A year from now, if a study by the U.S. Geological Survey pans out, the state could see even more activity. Intrigued by the drilling around Parshall, the USGS is going to try next year to recalculate the oil potential of a geological formation called the Williston Basin, which includes the Bakken Formation below it.
The USGS wants to check out an estimate by the late Denver-based USGS geochemist Leigh Price, who wrote in 1999 that the Bakken's shale potentially contained 413 billion barrels of oil. By comparison, Alaska's North Slope, the nation's largest oil resource, holds between 50 billion and 70 billion barrels of oil.
Price died before the paper could be reviewed by fellow scientists and published, but his estimate has created quite a buzz in the industry.
"It's mind-boggling," said Lynn Helms, director of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources.
The Bakken's oil would appear to dwarf that of Alaska, but Alaskan oil is much easier to get out of the ground. Federal geologists estimate that about 30 percent to 50 percent of the Alaskan oil is recoverable, or a mean of about 26 billion barrels.
The Bakken's shale is so tight that only 1 percent to 3 percent of it may be recoverable using present-day technology, Helms said. That would come to about 4.1 billion to 12.3 billion barrels.
By comparison, ANWR, the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve, holds about 10.4 billion barrels of technically recoverable crude, according to USGS estimates.
"The Bakken is one of the worst rock (formations) on the planet," Helms said.
Still, with North Dakota crude fetching $78 a barrel lately, there could be serious money to be made.
It's that potential that is driving the renewed interest in North Dakota, with Parshall at its center. "This is probably one of the top two or three oil plays in the U.S. today," said Ness.
Wayzata-based Northern Oil and Gas is just one of several oil exploration companies hoping to cash in on Parshall's potential. The startup says it is one of the largest holders of mineral rights in the area, after EOG. In a joint venture with Austin, Texas-based Brigham Exploration, Northern Oil drilled its first well in Parshall last month.
Michael Reger, Northern Oil's CEO, grew up in an oil-industry family in Billings, Mont. By this time next year, he predicts, the wheat and grazing land around Parshall will have a well every few miles. Each well needs a whole 640-acre section because the pipe has to extend nearly a mile or more from the starting hole to make it efficient.
Horizontal drilling technology has made it possible to recover oil from the tight shale of the Bakken Formation, which has been estimated to contain 413 billion barrels of oil. By comparison, Alaska's North Slope, the nation s largest oil resource, holds between 50 billion and 70 billion barrels. (JOHN DOMAN, Pioneer Press)drilling, introduced about a dozen years ago, has given the oil industry a way to finally extract oil from the Bakken's shale and other places where it was once almost impossible.
As the drill reaches the sedimentary rock roughly 9,000 feet below the surface, it begins a gradual 90-degree turn into the layer for another mile, exposing more pipe to the shale for greater collection.
In the last few years, drillers added fracture technology to horizontal drilling. In fracture technology, mud is forced into the drilled hole under immense pressures to "frack" or break up the shale further. The deeper cracks allow more oil to flow to the pipe.
The advent of horizontal technology made drilling the Bakken practical, but it was the rise in crude oil prices that made it attractive. When North Dakota's oil industry tanked back in the 1990s, prices for its native crude fell to as low as $3 a barrel.
This year, honey-colored North Dakota crude hit an all-time high of $88.68 a barrel on Nov. 23, the day after Thanksgiving, Helms said.
"The technology and the high commodity prices met at the right time," Ness said.
In 2005, before the Parshall wells had even been drilled, the state's $4 billion oil industry was contributing $280 million in taxes and throwing off another $280 million in royalties and lease payments, according to the petroleum association.
The association expects that the increased activity in the state will spur the oil industry to hire 12,000 more people, from roughnecks to geologists to truck drivers, over the next four years.
Annual salaries for the industry average about $60,000, about double the state's average, Ness said.
And although North Dakotans tend to avoid displays of extravagance, anecdotes of sudden oil wealth are starting to trickle in. "In Mountrail County, you're making millionaires out of farmers and ranchers there on a monthly basis," Ness said. "It's going to change the economy of the area for a significant time ahead."
Of course, not every county is a Mountrail and not every farmer a millionaire. The results from Dunn and Divide counties, where similar exploration efforts are underway, so far aren't as rosy as in Mountrail, he said.
And because the Bakken oil isn't easy to reach, it will take decades to realize the full potential of the formation.
"Getting it out is a problem - we've just barely figured out how to do that, so recovery is going to be very, very slow," said Helms of the state's mineral resources department.
The bustle of activity has piqued the interest of Mountrail County residents.
John O'Neill, 52, is the rig manager for Nabors Building, which is drilling a well for Northern Oil and Gas and Brigham Exploration. He is from Williston, but said his wife grew up three miles from the site and her family owns 14 quarter-acres nearby.
"So I'm really curious what this is going to do," he said, nodding to the drilling rig.
Maybe his in-laws are sitting on valuable mineral rights, he said. If so, he joked, maybe his wife won't need him anymore. He gives a hearty laugh.
"Everybody's pretty excited," O'Neill said. "But a lot of them don't know what to think."
You are correct. That is from ConocoPhillips at the link below the figure.
How can you get people back to living in caves, if you develop low-cost, effective energy sources?
So true. People here are suspicious of these shiny programs from 'elsewhere'.
It is seldom people will go to bat for any idea that has nothing in it for them, that is just human nature.
Take the one-two of Socialized health care and gay "marriage"--which would have the general population paying for the consequences of the perversions of others.
Or the anti-smoking crowd who got the camel's nose under the tent with the perfectly reasonable request for no-smoking areas, and expanded that to shove smokers (literally, this time of year) out into the cold. (I want to know if they are any healthier now that they aren't exposed to all that evil smoke, or if they are about the same.)
With a willing media, they can find sufficient boogeymen and plenty of useful idiots and true believers to protest most anything, and for some of them, it is an industry. If there was ever enough of whatever they are protesting for, or the (complete) elimination of what they are protesting against, they'd have to find a new boogeyman or a new line of work.
In the early '60s, she reminded me that the same techniques Hitler and Stalin used to manipulate their populations could be used here, and often commented that if Hitler had had NBC, CBS, and ABC, he would have ruled the world--this when most TVs were black and white.
She saw the rise of the New Left as the Marxist/Lennist Socialism it was and is still.
She saw through the things which were being touted as grand cultural changes, and as a child one of the first stories I learned was The Emperor's New Clothes, a fairy tale which only lacks a few more brave children to come true in so many aspects of modern life.
She also taught me that anything in politics which appeals solely to emotion is a scam: someone, somewhere is going to benefit, somehow, from pushing this idea, directly and now, or later after they have built on the idea.
She fought for years for Conservation Issues, especially to keep the ecology of a particular watershed from being destroyed, while the budding "environmental" movement focused on appearances, and the river died. What was a tremendous commercial fishery industry in the region is gone, not because of overharvesting, but because of protectionist measures which focused on the appearance of things as being natural rather than functioning that way. The artificial safeguards which would have protected oyster beds, etc. were banned because they did not appear natural and scenic after the natural systems had been disrupted or eliminated for the sake of pleasure craft.
When that first Earth Day occurred, she cried, not out of joy for the culmination of 20 years of effort to save the ecology of that watershed, but because she knew by the rhetoric that this would be, and was even then being twisted to take more power away from the people who knew the watershed from decades of making their living there, and put in the hands of those who had no ties to the land, the river, nor the harvest it produced--power in the hands of those who would listen to every 'expert' with a PhD but not ever listen to 'anecdotal' evidence, even when the latter was obviously correct.
With the perspective of one whose family still holds a small fragment of a land grant from the 1600s, she taught me that despite the best intentions of their founders, institutions change, and that governments, especially governments, will as rapidly corrupt their founding principles as the lack of vigillance of the governed will permit.
Ignorance of those founding principles must first be widespread, and when the Left successfully siezed the schools and the Constitution of these United States became something not studied, but only bandied about, and English comprehension reached a new low, the way would be open to the destruction of the Republic.
But despite seeing it coming, there is little solace in being able to say, "I told you so.", especially when the muttering crowd fades away or has to find a new way to make a living and cannot afford the time to fight for the restoration of the old and put food on the table at the same time.
"Bread and circuses!" decreed Ceaser, and the masses will be mollified.
In a generation or two of historical revision and the 'big lie' no one will know the difference, anyway, and anyone who says different will be decried as a radical, a doddering old codger, or an idiot or all of those.
She predicted the war on the family in America in the early 1960s, the use of a consolidated permanent record in government hands on every citizen, the use of the Social Security number as an ID number (even though it said on the card that it was "not for identification purposes"--not any more!).
I could go on, but she taught me to look for the worst abuses that could come of any new power the government usurped from the people, and to expect them in the event the government siezed that power.
My starry-eyed radical era lasted about 5 minutes, as she calmly, Socratically, (through the use of questions aimed at getting to a particular point), and systematically demolished the premise. I don't even recall what the idea was, just that she made mincemeat of it is short order.
Now that I am a great-grandfather, I am trying to teach a new generation to look for 'the catch', to find the flaws in logic, and to seek the best education they can give themselves.
If it was hard then, it is even harder now that the curricula have been hijacked by special interests, and the eras which can be found in relatively factual form in old history books published in the early 1900s are rarely taught as more than a watered down fable or a set of namens and dates. Since then, the history books have been revised so many times that the same man who was offered the crown and turned it down is only decried as a rich (white, of course) slaveowner (George Washington).
None of this has happened by accident, with the exception of those of us who have slipped through the cracks and failed to be indoctrinated.
But then, to her credit, and my unending gratitude, mother was aware of the following--and mother was right.
Communist Goals (1963)
http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm
Congressional Record—Appendix, pp. A34-A35
January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals
EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Thursday, January 10, 1963
Mr. HERLONG. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America. At Mrs. Nordman’s request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following “Current Communist Goals,” which she identifies as an excerpt from “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen: [From “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen]
CURRENT COMMUNIST GOALS
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture—education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use [”]united force[”] to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.
Note by Webmaster: The Congressional Record back this far has not be digitized and posted on the Internet. It will probably been available at your nearest library that is a federal repository. Call them and ask them.
Your college library is probably a repository. This is an excellent source of government records.
Another source are your Congress Critters. They should be more than happy to help you in this matter. You will find the Ten Planks of the Communist Manifesto interesting at this point.
Documentation Webmaster Forest Glen Durland found the document in the library. Sources are listed below. The quote starts on page 259. Microfilm: California State University at San Jose Clark Library, Government Floor Phone (408)924-2770 Microfilm Call Number: J 11 .R5 Congressional Record, Vol. 109 88th Congress, 1st Session Appendix Pages A1-A2842 Jan. 9-May 7, 1963 Reel 12 The book was found in the off campus stacks, was ordered and checked. The quote below was checked against the original and is correct. The few errors in the copy from the Congressional Record are shown in [ ] . The quote starts on page 259. California State University at San Jose, Clark Library stacks call number: Naked Communist HX 56 S55 Book title page: Skousen, W. Cleon. Naked Communist Salt Lake City, Utah: Ensign Publishing Co. C. 1961 , 9th edition July 1961.
I don’t mind.
Possible update:
Not so fast, Alaska
Reports about increase in ConocoPhillips’ 2008 capital budget misleading
Conoco retracted that report, said it was last year’s plan and this year’s plan would be revised due to changed tax structure. BP is getting approval for its extreme drill length well off the North Slope.
Is that the Liberty Project?
I believe it sounds familiar.
Let them come in large numbers. Then shoot, bury and keep quiet.
So, what do you make of this?
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
Is it a lowball? Does “recoverable” take technology advancement into account?
It depends on what they mean as "undiscovered".
Yes, I see it as a lowball estimate. When you think about it, for them to revise previous estimates upward by a factor of 25 is pretty much for any Governmental Agency.
Now it is up to us to prove the estimate is low.
Their statement was "recoverable using current technology", and that is evolving from well to well, so no, future advancements are not taken into account..
From what you’ve written in the past, I take it that you are an “in the dirt” participant in this but do you have any ideas on how somebody could try and take advantage of this if they believe in the opportunity here?
You have mail.
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