Contact your Congress critters to let them know that you are tired of high gas prices.
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.
Ask him if he’s consider moving up here to Alberta. We need all the good geologists we can get.
We love banjo and fiddle, too. Yee-HAW!
Contact your Congress critters to let them know that you are tired of high gas prices.
He does love Canada and there are a couple of festivals he plays up there. Is Wintergrass up there?
A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released April 10, shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency’s 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil.
Technically recoverable oil resources are those producible using currently available technology and industry practices. USGS is the only provider of publicly available estimates of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas resources.
New geologic models applied to the Bakken Formation, advances in drilling and production technologies, and recent oil discoveries have resulted in these substantially larger technically recoverable oil volumes. About 105 million barrels of oil were produced from the Bakken Formation by the end of 2007.
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
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Whatever it is, it’s that much less not imported from the Middle East, and thank God for it.
If you like $5/gal, Thank Congress in Nov.
Pray for W and Our Troops
I guess that you should go there then and tell all us who are drilling there today just what it is that we’re doing wrong.
The actual production figures fall seriously short of your data. We are producing about 150 thousand barrels per day from about 1200 wells.
Maybe if we plug your numbers into those wells, they will somehow double production.
“I smiled to beat hell, and I went to town and had a beer,” Bartelson, 65, says....”
....I love it!!...good for you old farmer...we need more stories like this....so what if it doesn’t stop our foreign dependence on oil....at least it’s a start...at least somebody’s doing something more than the nay saying we’re getting from the Libs.
EOG Resources just leased some land in east Texas from my family. Wishing them continued success.
I know several people who are very busy in the oil industry - you are right though, all we are hearing is doom and gloom from the media.
Again, there are limitations to what a given field can produce before you do damage to it. The Gulf Coast has potential because there are areas that are off limits near the Florida Coast. The Louisiana district is much older and has been in a slight decline for a while now but newer methods have helped to raise those levels somewhat.
Even in a proven field, there are pockets that yield more than others. It all boils down to what you find when you drill a well. There is still a great deal of risk involved.
I think it’s in WA.
It IS Stampede Time right now in Calgary. tho!
How about the popular bumper sticker from the early ‘90’s;
“God....Please let there be another Oil Boom, I promise not to piss it away this time.....(I always loved that one)
I never saw that one but it rings true! lol
bookmark
Given that we require about 20 million barrels per day, you are correct. Not much of a stretch to throw that dart toward the barn.
Unfortunately greenie-weenies have financial backing from somewhere to have stopped the reopening of those wells.
Most of these lower producing conventional oil wells were capped back in the 90's when oil dipped to $17 / barrel.
The goobermint doesn't want the US to reopen these wells that in the lowest producing wells only have to pump 10 barrels a day to be profitable at $110/barrel.
This is a story the LSM isn't airing.
Amazing, I would love to hear the excuses for all that!! We need to keep getting the word out and sooner or later the rats will fold! They always do!
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