Posted on 01/27/2008 5:17:21 PM PST by jmcenanly
Bakken and Torquay Formations - A Saudi Arabia of oil under Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Datkota, Montana and Manitoba
The Bakken oil formation is possibly the largest conventional oil discovery in Canada since 1957. If this oil formation plays out toward the higher end of size and recoverability then it will change the geopolitics of oil and the economies of the United States and Canada. If a lot of the oil proves difficult to recover now, new technologies could still drastically improve the percent recoverable. The motivation to pull out another 100 billion barrels would be $9 trillion at todays prices.
(Excerpt) Read more at nextbigfuture.com ...
Don' be messin' wif' 'em. They are the master species!!!!
Forget it...the green Commie Lib ‘Rats will find some reason as to why we can’t.
Save the Earth...beat the snot out of an environmentalist...
/sarchasm - The gaping hole between truth and a liebrall.
Terrible news for the Dakotas and Montana, as everyone on top of this formation will have to move to make way for endangered species.
So far, they have let the play develop..The latest wells that EOG have reported have been in excess of 2000 BOPD. Hundreds, if not thousands of wells are planned, so it is extremely encouraging. If we can get all of these resource plays working, like the Barnett Shale, the Woodford Shale, the Fayettville Shale and all of the other nonconventional horizontal shale plays working, we might be able to compete a little better. However, OPEC will drop the price low enough to keep that from happening...
The world is just about out of oil doncha know?
Unfortunately, in their quest for power, Democrats have politicized oil and energy, to the detriment of society, as per usual.
There will be some reason why we can’t do it. Probably some toad, or fish or moth that lives there and nowhere else.
Is this discovery part of the oil shale (Colorado) fields that have been discussed for years? Or is it new fields of oil shale, or fields where the oil can be pumped out rather than extracted from shale?
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I had always hoped that Kansas was floating on oil, so that we could tell the camel jockeys to drink theirs.
Oh, well, I guess I’ll have to settle for the Dakotas and Montana. Boo hoo. Oh, and I have something in mind for the camel jockeys to do with their oil....
I have posted several articles on the Bakken shale and its potential. These lands have been drilled before so there’s really no serious environmental concerns that can be legitimately raised. The oil they are drilling for in the Bakken has been known about for decades from previous drilling but wasn’t economical to exploit until the price of oil went up recently and new technology made it possible. According to a geologists estimate there could be as much as 250-500 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken with anywhere from 10% to 25% of that recoverable depending on the technology. This oil isn’t like the shale oil in Colorado that has to be baked out of the shale but is instead recoverable through horizontal drilling and the fracturing of the shale rock to make it more permeable.
Thanks for the post. I pinged Smokin’ Joe as he is the resident expert (he’s a geologist who’s been working this formation for years) so maybe he can add a few words.
The Extremely Endangered Threeandahalf Stiped Long Tailed Black Whiskered Prairiedog?
Not to be confused with the similar, but so very different, also endangered, Threeandaquarter Striped Long Tailed Black Whiskered Prairiedog that only lives in the next watershed; and which is not the same as the Highly Threatened Threeandahalf Stipple-Striped Long Tailed Black Whiskered Prairiedog that only lives in the watershed that adjoins the other two, to the north....
I think that by "conventional" they mean recoverable by means of current drilling technology, not oil shale. This is potentially great news. As the article states, it could change the geopolitics of the energy problem.
I forgot to mention the USGS will release the results of their survey of this formation in April. We should have a better estimate then of the total oil reserves there.
There is no way in HELL that congress, including most Republicans, will allow serious oil drilling of this or any other discovery on our soil. Just ain’t gonna happen. Washington DC is run by special interest groups and political cowards. They’ll allow some test drilling, but it will take 50 years for all of the enviro lawsuits to play out.
Ooh, ooh! You can’t drill there! We have to preserve those areas because of the endangered..er...the endangered...”Majestic Free Range Spork Weasels!”
Where did you come upon the fact that ANWR contains a 10 year supply of US oil consumption?
The Bakken is conventional in that oil flows from fracutes in the formation. The “pay zone” is only 10 or 15 feet thick and is at a depth of 10,000 feet. Horizontal boring does the trick.
You really do need to check your numbers.
Places like Sidney, MT and Dickinson, ND are sprouting oil rigs faster than people. You're a little too pesimistic on this one.
There may be as much as 400 BILLION barrels in the Bakken. Recoverable oil? Enough for a while
were not dead yet?
Groups like these?
Till we break satanallahs hold our country is SOLD!
Heh, read this while we were watching a show on the History Channel called “Crude”. The petroleum engineers are tolling the death bell for oil, saying that globally, oil production peaked in 2006, because we’ve found all we can find, and is on the way down. I just had to laugh, since there is a heck of a lot of ocean that can still be checked for oil, as well as uninhabited land. They just want us to break our ‘addiction to oil’.
“You’re a little too pesimistic on this one.”
Yeah, you’re probably right... but I have absolutely no confidence in our worthless congress to do ANYTHNG right. Know what I mean?
Bullseye!
We MUST end our association with Saudi Arabia.
Shucks, the oil formation doesn’t come far enough south or east to include my 160 acres in central South Dakota. I guess now I’ll have to wait for Ted Turner to make me an offer.
Mark Twain refered to the Congress as “That Grand Old, National Asylum for the Helpless.” He was, of course, correct.
“There is no way in HELL that congress, including most Republicans, will allow serious oil drilling of this or any other discovery on our soil. Just ain’t gonna happen. Washington DC is run by special interest groups and political cowards. They’ll allow some test drilling, but it will take 50 years for all of the enviro lawsuits to play out.”
I just hope that the majority of the land over the oil fields is private property.
I live a little further south and if you have the money, a crew will pull their big truck onto your land and drill for anything you want.
It gets a little more complicated if you want to move whatever you find across the road but thankfully, the jack booted thugs have not stopped private enterprise yet.
It is often the case that owning the land does not mean you own the mineral rights.
What you say is true. I own 80 acres in Wyoming that could have oil, but I don’t own the mineral rights (the state does). But if I drilled and struck oil they would still pay me to keep pumping the oil, so its not such a bad deal.
Neither President Obama nor President McQueeq would ever allow it.
Not only more oil ois being found every year, so in natural gas, even a new large field found here in the US...PA.
Tom Daschle?
An endangered big-eyed spineless quivering thigh-gouting DimWeasel is now running for POTUS......lots of US taxdollars now being spent to preserve the megelomental glutton power eating habits for this unique creature.
That’s the point: The libs who claim ANWAR is useless don’t know the ultimate reserves there either.
They are inventing numbers wholesale, then comparing them against total US consumption, without regard to better recovery methods.
I own my mineral rights and have no valuable minerals, go figure!
Much of the new production is in areas with established oil fields (vertical wells producing from different formations). The only real snags insofar as environmental objections occur on Federally controlled land, with the usual host of hoops to jump through.
This is not to say that there is a casual approach to the environment on private land by the oil companies--Eastern Montana or North Dakota is too small an area, population-wise, to be garnering a bad reputation and expecting to do business--but that Federal requirements will include surveying reclaimed rig roads to be used as access routes to a new wellsite for rare plants, and doing raptor surveys on nests which have been obviously unoccupied for years.
Odds and ends.
Actual pay horizons generally range in thickness from two to about twenty feet.
The shale is the source rock, the oil is usually best produced from porous zones below the upper shale. In the deeper parts of the basin, there are two shales, an upper at the top and the lower shale at the base. Generally, production occurs from carbonates and fine clastics below the upper shale (the Middle Bakken).
The oil is light, sweet crude, and was commanding prices on par with WTI, which made it one of the highest priced midcontinent crude oils.
Pipeline capacity issues are being resolved to the extent that buyer discounts, once of up to $30.00 per barrel are fading fast and prices are coming back in line with the market. Previously, tar sands crude from Alberta was loading the system to the point that there was more oil than pipeline to carry it.
Lithogy differs from the Eastern Montana fields to the North Dakota ones. Eastern Montana has a combination of extremely fine clastics (sand/silt) and dolomite as a general rule in the porous layer. In North Dakota, along the Nesson Anticline, the rock type is predominantly carbonate peloids, dolomitized in some cases and sand. Either will do, but the pay zones in Montana are easier to stay in, as they are more consistent on gamma ray logs and have less structural variation.
Horizontal drilling technology has made this a profitable reservoir, and a single wellbore can branch out numerous times (most I have worked have been triple lateral wells) and reach up to two miles away, which allows a single well to drain up to two square miles of reservoir (1280 acres). Multi-well pads further reduce the environmental footprint, and can reach out to produce 6 or more square miles from a 5 acre (or smaller) pad.
This reduces costs (shorter feeder pipelines, less dirtwork, one road in, etc. as well.
Several gas plants are being constructed to process the natural gas and other volatile light ends being produced with the oil.
At the State level, there is good cooperation between the Oil Companies and the State Agencies involved, and the states are benefiting from enhanced revenue, directly when the state is the lease owner (States have a school house section every township, IOW, one out of efery 36 square miles is state owned.) Local economies in the oil producing areas are benefiting as well.
Most of the people working on the rigs and in a supervisory capacity are locals, which makes things go much more smoothly as well.
Experimentation with recovery enhancing technologies is ongoing.
That is why there are National Parks, so the prairie dogs and tourists can commune. AFAIK, they are protected on Federal Land, which is plenty.
Experimentation with recovery enhancing technologies is ongoing.
Joe
Do you have any idea what the current rate of recovery is? 10%, 20% or higher? Or maybe that’s a trade secret?
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