Companies line up to drill after survey shows Dakota oil, gas fields far bigger than believed

Energy companies are lining up for their shot to drill in the Dakotas and Montana after a new government report revealed that a massive geological formation stretching across the states contains twice the oil and three times the amount of natural gas than was originally believed.

While the new estimate is drawing smaller companies to the game, the larger players like Schlumberger, Halliburton and Continental Resources are pushing forward with ambitious multi-year plans to stake their claim in the industry.

Continental recently announced a five-year plan to triple its production by 2017. The company’s growth is based on success in North Dakota and Montana as well as in parts of Oklahoma.

You can only see as far as you look. We played on top of the Cline Shale here in the Permian Basin for over 50 years before someone went down far enough to find it. We started hitting the upper part of the Cline about 7 years ago before we ever really knew what we were getting into. Our last 16 wells have all been Cline wells and we still have room for 30 more up nth and probably over 100 on the big ranch. All the wells on the big ranch are up above the Cline.

Move over, Saudi Arabia. You are going to hit the end of your low-recovery-cost petroleum resources quickly enough, and then who will be running their entire economy on domestic oil and natural gas?

The entire Muslim world has piggybacked on the resourcefulness of the Western capitalists since before the Second World War, and while that relationship has made the heads of state in those countries among the wealthiest Middle Easterners ever, since time began, they no longer have the nearly uncontested monopoly they once had, and they seem unable to diversify significantly. The Muslim countries have been particularly unable to muster the kind of application of capital to fund and develop new technology on their own, though they are unusually adept at taking the existing technology and converting it to new destructive uses.

There was a very good reason no sons of Islam were to be found in the “Star Trek” series, set some three hundred years in the future. The cult had self-destructed and the remaining practitioners had died out or become pariahs on their own world.

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