Posted on 02/09/2012 1:37:13 PM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
Even the worst of presidents cannot stop the best of times, and it's beginning to look as if an unprecedented energy boom just might save President Barack Obama's re-election, despite his undying efforts to thwart energy development.
He's worked hard at it, you know, and few things I've read sum it up better than a Wall Street Journal article by Stephen Moore. He interviewed Harold Hamm, an oil-company CEO who first discovered the Bakken oil fields in Montana and North Dakota, which was a bit like discovering gold in California in the 19th century but more than that. This is big, big, big, maybe 24 billion barrels' worth of big, $18 trillion worth of big.
Ho-hum, said Obama when Hamm talked to him on one occasion about all of this. According to what Hamm told Moore, the president said oil and gas may count for something for a few years, but that the future is green, that things like battery-driven cars will save us. And here is a guy who walks his talk in more ways than central-planning goofs that give us such mistakes as a Solyndra solar-panel firm the sun failed to shine on.
(Excerpt) Read more at scrippsnews.com ...
Great. Gas just jumped another 12 cents here today. Great. Can’t wait for the magic $4.00 a gallon. Hurry, get here quick $4.00 a gallon. Woo hoo. Good job Obammy.
Hopefully, we’ve reached Peak 0bama.
Neither can he. That’ll drive green technologies during his second term (it could happen!).
Peak Obama..ahahaha
Permits to drill will be given. Gas prices will drop. In September and October 2012.
There are all kinds of bumbling, bureaucratic delays in granting oil permits. There are proposals for increased, targeted tax hikes for oil and gas that will take much of the energizing profit out of exploration. There are Securities and Exchange Commission rules that complicate matters enough to make criminal mistakes a major possibility. There's the Environmental Protection Agency worrying the energy industry to death, and then there was the Justice Department's unbelievable pursuit of criminal sanctions because oil companies accidentally killed 28 birds that were not even endangered.
And you know Obama will be touting the boom during the reelection saying the regulations are necessary but, see, they aren't stopping development. Saying one thing while his environazis in EPA or Marxists in green jobs program do their best to shut down fossil fuel development and use.
Just watch Kalifornia if you want to see the shape of the future - an increasing and high percentage of cars sold in the next 15 years have to be electric. Eric Bolling of Fox News said he tried the Chevy Volt, took all night to charge the battery and then crapped out at 20 miles while he was commuting to work and died in a tunnel under the Hudson River. It switched over to gas but for $40,000 you should get more than 20 miles per charge!
“an increasing and high percentage of cars sold in the next 15 years have to be electric”.
I’m not seeing a problem here. Most welfare systems are now direct deposit, and even in California, how far do you have to drive to 7-11 to pick up beer, lottery tickets, potato chips and Slim Jims for the family?
What I want to know is why the Democrats are always the beneficiaries of these gratuitous booms? The same thing happened on Clinton’s watch. Meantime, Bush suffered thru record gas prices, even though he tried like the dickens to free up the oil industry. Is it simply that Obama benefits from Bush’s work, while Bush suffered from Clinton’s failures?
Is Obama really this ******* stupid? Did not even take a basic Physics course in High School to understand how electricity is created? What powers his mythical electric car, Unicorn Farts?
Or is it all about chaos and the fundamental transformation as we collapse from his unobtainable edicts?
That is a fundamental question.
Zer0 has certainly been successful in instituting fundamental change.
I suspect that he really doesn't know of how the laws of Physics are not just a good idea. The laws of economics? - he seems to lack a certain basic level of understanding there too.
Presentation by Steven L. Mueller, President and CEO of Southwestern Energy to Credit Suisse Energy Summit in Vail, Colorado, February 9, 2012. Now I want to get to the Brown Dense, and this is one of the ones we always get the questions on. In southern Arkansas, we’ve put together 500,000 acres. Total on New Ventures plays in the United States, we’ve got about a million total acres. I do want to mention the 500,000, before I start talking about the Brown Dense, that other 500,000 is across different plays. But, in 2012, we have two wells in our budget for something we haven’t talked about yet. It’s an oil play in the United States. And to drill two wells in the budget, we’ll have to talk about it sometime this summer. So kinda look for that. Also look forward to the Brown Dense. In the Brown Dense we drilled our first well where it’s got that yellow tag on there. {Note: Mueller is here referring to the Roberson well on a map.} Finished that well in late 2011. Finished fracking on it last week. We have 11 stage frack on it. Yesterday we ran a packer and tubing in the hole, and as of about 15 minutes ago, we’re supposed to be in production. Now I haven’t got the actual confirmation of the time of production, but we’re supposed to go on noon Central Time today. So it is on production. It will take several days to clean up. But, by our conference call, we should be able to talk about that well. I get asked all the time, “What would make you excited from a production rate on that well?” What makes me excited and what economics are two different things. If we could get a 100 barrel a day rate out of this well, I’d be jumping up and down. What you really need to have to make economics work on what we think will be an 8 million dollar well, ultimately, is somewhat between 400 and 500 barrels a day. But we fracked this just like a Fayetteville Shale well. Four hundred feet between the fracks. Very similar design. We did not – it’s about a 3,500 foot total interval – we didn’t space them real close together like they do in the Bakken, we didn’t do some of the things they do in the Eagle Ford. So if we can get any kind of decent rate out of that, I know we can work it up to that 400 to 500 barrels a day. So that’s what would make me excited as we go through. We’ve also been working on the second well that’s just across the border in Louisiana. That well reached total depth last night. It’s got a total of a 6,700 foot lateral on it. We’ll be running casing on it the next couple of days. And assuming we can get casing all the way to bottom, we’ll have almost double the lateral length we do of the first well. We’ll do roughly the same amount of spacing, but this will give us a test on what happens if you have a longer lateral with roughly the same amount of spacing between our fracks. And then there’s some other wells posted on there. {Again, Mueller is referring to a map.} “OBO” is “operated by others.” The well closest to us – our two yellow spots – the well operated by Cabot, that well is at TD, and is actually fracking right now, so you’re getting some information on it. There’s two stars in that big red blog on the right hand of the map. That’s the Monroe Gas Field. The southernmost star is a well operated by Devon. I think they’ve actually fracked that well and should be flowing that back. The star just north of that is a well that’s permitted. It has not spud yet. And the far right hand star just barely on the edge of that map, that is Exxon XTO well. They’re at TD on that. So in the next 30 days you should start seeing them frack that well also. The end result here is that when we went into this play, and announced it last summer, we thought we were going to have to drill 10 wells, it would take us up through the first quarter of 2013 to drill all 10 wells ourselves, and somewhere in early 2013 to figure out if this works. With the industry helping us, I can’t guarantee it, but I think by end of summer, we’ll have figured out if this works. As an industry, we’ll have 10 wells. And certainly by the end of the first quarter we’re going to have information on at least five wells, and may be even six wells at that point in time. So this play in developing rapidly. We’re excited about this. People say, “What could be the potential here?” On our 500,000 acres, again, with just a little bit of core data, and a couple of vertical wells to help us figure this out, we think we have about 30 billion barrels in place, and you got 10 percent recovery factor, we have the potential of about 3 billion barrels of oil. So this could be significant to the industry. There is a takeaway, both on the gas and oil here, because there’s a conventional gas and oil fields, and the takeaway comes to the Gulf coast, not to Oklahoma, so we don’t have to worry about that part of it.
And I think his estimate on the recovery factor is conservative. I think they can pull more out of it with current technology. This is exciting...
Permits granted in September won't affect prices in November. Permits granted NOW won't much affect prices in November...it takes time.
After we (the industry, not just a few of us) doubled Montana's production, the excellent wells near Stanley, ND had sparked even greater interest in the North Dakota portion of the Williston Basin, and from roughly 2003 onwards, drilling in North Dakota increased. There are now some 200 rigs drilling in the state, and production is over 500,000 barrels of oil a day, making North Dakota the 4th largest oil producer in the country.
But the press didn't cover the boom so much until things went all the hell elsewhere, and then in the last two years they covered the jobs and growing pains of smaller communities when they weren't campaigning wholesale to shut down the industry.Nonsense-(I shop there)-and an affront to the hard working crews there who are constantly stocking shelves trying to keep up.
Federal Leases were not let, or were shut down all over the Rockies, but the majority of the land in North Dakota is deeded, private land, and the Feds couldn't just turn off the switch so easily.
It is dependent on fracking, on transportation, and will likely get smacked with some regulation about flaring gas (they already tried some nonsense over "haze").
That is where the EPA comes in, and where the Obamites haven't yet been able to get a credible reason to shut things down, with the exception of the pipeline.
Pipeline capacity has been an issue here for a decade, so the workarounds were in motion (rail, trucking) before the Administration stymied progress on the Keystone line, and additional capacity development has been made to some of the existing lines.
We're Americans, we'll find a way, while they aren't (at least in spirit), and they're still looking.
In the meantime, the press will spin everything to make their guy look good, (right down to the absent body counts of wounded and killed US troops since Obummer took office), and they won't give the Bush administration credit, nor the Obamites blame.
As for the oil, there's a profit to be made, and development will continue as long as there is development to be done.
And the press, who has heavily bought into 'peak oil', 'eeevil oil companies', 'eeevil technology', AGW: AKA "Climate Change", 'environmental disaster', and "Green"--not to mention Obama, won't be singing a different tune even as the water sluices over the decks of their sinking ship.
That quote from Mueller is great.
Would you happen to have a link on that ? I would like to circulate it, but not as a big block of text, but as a link?
If so, that would be very helpful.
Thanks.
The transcript begins a few paragraphs down.
thank you
Sure. I probably should have provided it in the first place.
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