Free Republic

Tuesday the U.S. Geological Survey announced the largest ever assessment of “continuous oil” ever made in the United States. The Wolfcamp shale in the area of Midland, Texas is estimated to contain three times the oil and gas of the Bakken shale formation in Montana and North Dakota. From the USGS: The Wolfcamp shale in the Midland Basin portion of Texas’ Permian Basin province contains an estimated mean of 20 billion barrels of oil, 16 trillion cubic feet of associated natural gas, and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey. This...

$75 dollars a barrel – that’s the price crude oil would have to hit for frackers in North Dakota’s Bakken fields to feel pressure to slow new production, according to Greg Zuckerman, author of “The Frackers” and a special reporter at the Wall Street Journal. “All these guys have hedged. They’ve got production [and] they’ve already got the acreage. They’re not gonna stop but maybe they’ll kind of slow new stuff.” Fracking in other parts of the country, though, is likely to be much more resilient. In Texas’s Eagle Ford and Permian basin, Zuckerman says oil prices would have to...

Business is booming in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale oilfields. With that boom comes a need for infrastructure. More than half of the oil out of the Bakken leaves by train or truck. But companies are working on pipelines. One proposed pipeline would cut clear through the state of Iowa. A Texas company wants to build an 1,100 mile crude oil pipeline, from the northwest corner of the state to the southeast. In two years, the pipeline could be carrying up to 320,000 barrels a day, from the Bakken Shale Oil Fields, to Patoka Illinois, and from there, the oil would...

For more than a century, the global oil and natural gas supply picture changed only a decade at a time. In the past half-decade, however, the picture has changed with startling speed. That has been particularly true in America. New technologies opened regional production in areas including North Dakota's Bakken Shale and Texas' Eagle Ford basin.

Several hundred Chrysler minivans are stuck indefinitely on a piece of prime Detroit real estate, unable to be transported across America. The reason? The fossil fuel boom in Canada and the United States is hogging much of the available rail capacity needed to transport the vans. Citing a report by the Associated Press, the Windsor Star reports that railway capacity – which is normally transport new vehicles – is being eaten up by deliveries of oil from both the Alberta Oil Sands and the Bakken shale formation in the United States. According to the AP, just 9,500 railway carloads of...

The US shale boom has led some to predict that it will overtake Saudi Arabia as world’s largest oil and gas producer by 2020, thanks to the massive reserves found in plays such as the Bakken Shale of North Dakota, the Marcellus Shale in New York, and the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas; even the newly discovered Tuscaloosa Shale formation in Louisiana holds large potential. However there is a new shale formation that has been discovered in West Texas which could dwarf all others being drilled in the US at the moment. The play is known as the Cline Shale...

See NASA Graphic at link. NASA Earth Observatory's Suomi Satellite captured the night time glow from hundreds of flares from rigs drilled into the Bakken shale oil formation of North Dakota, a 360-million-year-old tectonic plate, creating a light show the size of metropolitan Boston. Fracking of the Bakken formation has liberated the oil that lies within...Flaring burns off excess natural gas during oil production. The controversial process effectively wastes a natural resource while simultaneously emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As of 2011, more than 35 per cent of North Dakota's natural gas production was burnt off in flares according...

This is a tale of two cities. No, not Dickens' phlegmatic London and passionate Paris. Nor the two neighborhoods Charles Murray contrasted in his recent bestseller "Coming Apart" -- prosperous but isolated Belmont (actually, Mitt Romney's home for decades) and needy and disorganized Fishtown. These two cities have names you may not recognize but which you have probably read about in the last few years: Fremont and Williston. Fremont, Calif., is the southernmost city in California's East Bay, just around the corner from (well, a few freeway exits away from) Silicon Valley. It's not as upscale as Palo Alto or...

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...

BISMARCK, N.D. — North Dakota has surpassed Louisiana as the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the nation, the U.S. Energy Department says. The agency's Energy Information Administration said North Dakota produced 6.38 million barrels of crude in May, edging Louisiana, which had 6.34 million barrels for the month. Oklahoma was ranked fifth, at 5.7 million barrels for that month, according to the most recent figures. Oil production data typically lags at least two months. Steven G. Grape, an Energy Department petroleum engineer, said Wednesday that North Dakota averaged 206,000 barrels daily in May, compared with 205,000 barrels for Louisiana. North Dakota's...

BISMARCK, North Dakota (AP) - The U.S. government estimated Thursday that up to 4.3 billion barrels of oil can be recovered from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota and Montana, using current technology. The U.S. Geological Survey called it the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed. The Bakken Formation encompasses some 25,000 square miles (64,750 sq. kilometers) in North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, in three layers. About two-thirds of the acreage is in western North Dakota, where the oil is trapped in a thin layer of dense rock nearly two miles (3 kilometers) beneath the surface....

BISMARCK, N.D. — Marathon Oil Corp.'s plans to drill as many as 300 new wells in western North Dakota within five years haven't been affected by a recent oil price slump, a top executive says. The Houston-based multinational formally opened an office in Dickinson on Thursday to oversee its recently acquired rights to drill, which cover 200,000 acres in Billings, Divide, Dunn, McKenzie, Mountrail and Williams counties. The office will employ about 25 people, said Steven Guidry, a Marathon regional vice president. There will be another 25 operations personnel in the field, and as many as eight oil rigs, each...