Posted on 07/06/2008 7:41:37 AM PDT by STARWISE
John Bartelson, who smokes Marlboro Lights through fingers blackened with tractor grease, may look like an average wheat farmer. He isn't. He's one of North Dakota's new oil barons.
Every month, he gets a check for tens of thousands of dollars from a company in Houston called EOG Resources Inc., which drilled two oil wells on his land last year. He says the day his first royalty check arrived was one to remember.
"I smiled to beat hell, and I went to town and had a beer," Bartelson, 65, says.
His new wealth springs from the Bakken formation, a sprawling deposit of high-quality crude beneath the durum wheat fields of North Dakota, Montana and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The Bakken may give the United States -- the world's biggest importer of oil -- a new domestic energy source.
Unlike the tar from Canada's oil sands, Bakken crude needs little refining. Swirl some of it in a Mason jar and it leaves a thin, honey-colored film along the sides. It's light -- almost like gasoline -- and sweet, meaning it's low in sulfur.
Best of all, the Bakken could be huge. The Geological Survey's Leigh Price, a Denver geochemist who died of a heart attack in 2000, estimated that the Bakken might hold 413 billion barrels. If so, it would dwarf Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, the world's biggest field, which has produced about 55 billion barrels.
The challenge is getting the oil out. Bakken crude is locked 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) underground in a layer of dolomite, a dense mineral that doesn't surrender oil the way more porous limestone does. The dolomite band is narrow, too, averaging just 22 feet (7 meters) in North Dakota.
The USGS said in April that the Bakken holds as much as 4.3 billion barrels that can be recovered using today's engineering techniques. That's a fraction of the oil that Price said should be there, but it's still the largest accumulation of crude in the 48 contiguous U.S. states. North Dakota, where Bakken exploration is most intense now, won't become Saudi Arabia unless technology improves.
For decades, the Bakken was the fool's gold of the oil industry. The name describes a geological formation that looks like an Oreo cookie: two layers of black shale that bleed oil into the middle layer of dolomite. It's named after Henry O. Bakken, the North Dakota farmer who owned the land where the first drilling rig revealed the shale layers in the 1950s.
All of the layers are thin -- about 150 feet altogether -- and none of them give up oil easily. In older, vertical wells, oil would often flow for a month and then fizzle.
Now, companies like EOG are drilling horizontally. They go straight down 10,000 feet and then put a slight angle in the mud motor, a 30-foot piece of tubing that drives the bit, so they hit the Bakken sideways, making a horizontal tunnel as much as 4,500 feet long through the dolomite. Then they pump pressurized water and sand into the hole to fracture the dolomite, making cracks for oil to seep through.
It eventually winds up in a pipeline that runs east to Clearbrook, Minn., and then south to Chicago.
Several billionaires are at work in the Bakken. Harold Hamm's Enid, Okla.-based Continental Resources Inc. has leases on 487,000 acres in Montana and North Dakota. Hamm, who started out driving a truck, owns 73 percent of Continental, worth $7.9 billion. Philip Anschutz, 68, founder of Qwest Communications International Inc. and Regal Entertainment Group, is there, too.
The big winner so far has been EOG, formerly a subsidiary of bankrupt energy trader Enron Corp. It drilled a horizontal well in western North Dakota just north of Parshall -- population 1,028 -- in April 2006. The well came online a month later and kicked out 1,883 barrels in the first seven days. Unlike the older vertical wells, it's still going.
Northern Oil & Gas Inc., a five-person company near Minneapolis, makes money without drilling or operating wells. It leases in promising areas like the Bakken and gets paid when someone else uses the land to drill.
The other people doing well in the Bakken are the mineral owners under the oil wells -- folks like John Bartelson. Oil drillers have paid them millions for right of access to the oil deposits.
Bartelson's checks are about to get bigger. One more EOG well just came online, he says, and another is about to be fractured with water. Still another has been permitted for drilling. For now, he's farming. The oil market is fickle, he says. Previous crashes drove the rigs out of North Dakota for years, leaving only the wheat.
"It'll crash again," Bartelson says, sipping on a late- afternoon cup of coffee beside his tractor.
Maybe so. But with crude trading above $125 a barrel, it'll be a long time before the rigs leave again, and John Bartelson is likely to be a wealthy man before they do.
Reason: Liberal Marxist Elitist Demoncraps and RINOS.
Seems like we have one of those RINOs running as the presumed Republican Presidential Candidate this year.
He ain’t getting my vote.
What and leave the delightful ND winters?
They are offering my son-in-law who has a MS in Geology his own business if he'll move to Calgary. How is the living up there?
He stupid! There is no one source for our energy independence. That’s why we need to exploit All our resources. I suspect you are one of those enviro-wackos who wants us to return to the good old days. You know. The ones where sanitation, refrigeration, mechanization and medication didn’t help us reach the current expectancy of 78 years of quality life.
Keep smiling, drink all the beer you want and keep the coffee pot hot, Mr Bartelson. Just don’t pull a “Jeb” and move to Beverly Hills. God bless you and grant many more years to enjoy you success.
Any Questions, Liberals?
I am not in the oil industry, I am just a plain ole American citizen that is sick to death of seeing everything in our country outsourced.
Being naive, I can’t understand how countries to the north of us and south of us have enough oil that they can export it but we, being smack dab in the middle don’t have any.
Nothing is impossible if you want it bad enough. In 3 years we were able to build an atomic bomb which ended WW2 and you’re telling us that with technology today we cannot get oil?
Do we need and alternative sources of energy, of course. Get the government out of it and let individuals develop it. I hate when I hear that we are addicted to oil. Natural human inguenutity will alway find ways to invent and produce. Pulling ethenol out of blue was downright stupid because nobody thought of the ramifications, as usual.
We need to drill and drill now, no matter how hard it will be. You can’t just give up or give in to the globalists that hate our guts.
Being self sufficient is the American Way. The ripple effect of us drilling is enormous, the jobs created, the tax es collected and so on.
But hey, what do I know.
I might get my degree in geology. I want to fine OIL for Americans*
* Americans -- NON LIBERALS
Are you an A$$ from the Daily Kos? Or do you just play one on FR?
I guess I'll thank you for your support of Hussien Obama in November! McCain is not who I would want but he is better then Hussien.
Some of you are so STUPID. A Third party won't win - and you'll help MARXISM spread with your vote. Dumba$$es.
I have been following developments, and investing in the Bakken even before EOG hit it big. You have your opinion, and I have mine. I think you are wrong. Only time will tell, but I have made a fortune, how about you?
Its not an easy degree to get. I couldn’t pronounce the names of some of his text books. I’m very proud of him and he is a good musician. sigh.
What is your point? I seriously doubt that anyone has ever asserted that any single source would yield what we require daily.
It makes good since for America to utilize its 500 year supply of oil, gas, and coal prudently.
I remember as a child he had a gang truck.
One of the hired hands from the university (future engineers) had attached a bumper sticker about being a piano player.
Dad at the end of Summer would give all the young college kids a coffee mug that said “I'm so smart I make myself sick”.
Nothing like running a long handled Mexican backhoe squaring up ditches to help make a young kid decide to stay in college and get an education.
Great post many of us totally agree.
One error in the story. The farmer is a royalty holder, not a driller. If he owns the mineral rights, he gets 1/8th (usually) of the money from the oil.
>>But aren’t we far better off if we drill between
>>50 and 150 miles offshore? Doesn’t it all
>>happen much quicker?
What, and displace the Communist Chinese? American natural resources can only be used if such usage advances the globalist cause.
Which reminds me...
Hey BP, GTHOOMC! - ‘cause WE didn’t vote for your monarchies.
Good story. Years ago I remember high school boys doing roofing jobs in the summer. They were paid more than anyone else, got a great tan, built muscles, and swore they would never do that job again, ever! ;^)
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