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North Dakota passed Alaska in March to become the second-leading state in crude oil production, trailing only Texas, according to preliminary figures released Monday. North Dakota produced an average of 575,490 barrels of crude oil every day in March, another record, according to Lynn Helms, director of the state’s Department of Mineral Resources. The crude is coming from a record 6,636 wells. In February, the state produced 558,255 barrels and had 6,450 wells. The number of rigs drilling in the state was at 208 on Monday, about where it has been for eight months, including a record 212 drilling for...

The April 8 edition of The Californian features an article about a strategy being used by a refiner in the heart of California oil country of buying large amounts of crude from North Dakota and paying to have it hauled by train to Bakersfield, Calif., where it’s turned into mostly gasoline and diesel for the California market. The ingenious part of this approach is that the company is turning a bigger profit using midcontinent crude than if it were buying roughly the same grade oil strictly in Kern County, Calif., the article by John Cox reported. More refiners will likely...

USGS next recoverable oil estimate expected to double to 8 billion barrels Ray Tyson Petroleum News Bakken Editor The U.S. Geological Survey, in a highly anticipated report to be released next year, is expected to at least double the amount of oil reserves that can be recovered from the U.S. portion of the massive Bakken play in North Dakota and Montana. This is the consensus of company executives and industry consultants interviewed by Petroleum News on the sidelines of the 2nd Annual Bakken Investor Conference held April 2-4 in Minot, North Dakota. April 2008 was the last time the USGS...

In the process of putting together the first edition of Petroleum News Bakken, we decided a geology lesson was needed. Welcome to Petroleum News Bakken. I hope you like our first edition well enough to check in twice a month — first and third weeks. Our editor, Ray Tyson, and I were born and raised in the Midwest; Ray in South Dakota, where he returned to live and work several years ago, and me in Minnesota. But nothing prepared us for the shock of the oil boom in nearby states and provinces. I’m staying in Alaska, focusing on the industry...

The North Dakota Industrial Commission, Department of Mineral Resources, has released a new and higher average cost for drilling and completing Bakken wells in North Dakota. Lynn Helms, director of the department that includes the state’s oil and gas division and geological survey, is now quoting $8.5 million for drilling and completing a Bakken well, versus the $7.3 million estimate he used in a December presentation, and the $6.6 million figure he used in August. (See related story on well costs on page 1 of this issue.) The latest estimate is in a slide he used in a March 20...

nfrastructure challenges in western North Dakota could limit the number of oil and gas drilling rigs in the Bakken system’s rich Williston Basin, industry executives said at a conference. As companies have flocked to tap resources there, heavy equipment has overwhelmed roads while workers have filled up available housing. The problem is more acute in North Dakota than Montana, said Mark Williams, senior vice president of exploration and development at Whiting Petroleum Corp. There are close to 220 drilling rigs in the Williston Basin. “We could easily double the number of rigs, purely based on resources,” Williams said. However, he...

Gas prices will be key issue in fall campaign so join us Friday 'live' from the Bakken formation in ND on energy policy in America.

Politics: The president stages a photo-op in Oklahoma to take credit for the portion of the Keystone XL pipeline that doesn't need his approval and for oil production on private and state lands beyond his jurisdiction. If one of his aides some morning remarked on a particularly lovely sunrise, it wouldn't surprise us if President Obama responded with a "thank you," so gifted is he in taking credit for successes that he has nothing to do with and that occur despite, not because, of his policies. So it will be Thursday, when Obama is scheduled to appear in Cushing, Okla.,...

Energy: The economist at the newspaper of record defends the president's energy policy of Solyndra, Chevy Volts and algae while dismissing the oil boom on private lands as a small-town hiccup with no impact on price. New York Times columnist and Keynesian economist Paul Krugman asks in a recent column why gas prices are rising if we are in the middle of a domestic oil boom. Doesn't the "drill, baby, drill" crowd claim, he argues, that prices will drop "if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want"? Without our domestic oil boom,...

While the haggling continues over oil pipelines across North America and bottlenecks intensify in the U.S. mid-continent, Canadian Pacific Railway, or CPR, is in its fourth year of turning trains into a significant method of crude transportation. The Calgary-based company, determined to build an edge on its rival Canadian National Railway, has been leading the way in shipping crude from the Bakken field in North Dakota and Saskatchewan. It started at 500 rail cars in 2008, each holding 650 barrels (about 890 barrels per day), expanded to 13,000 cars last year (23,150 bpd) and is now targeting 70,000 cars (125,000...

The continuing boom in North Dakota seemingly has no end. Last June oil production from the Bakken Formation exceeded 11 million barrels a month. In February it reached 16 million with estimates that by late spring North Dakota could be producing more oil than either California or Alaska. That’s more than double what the state produced just two years ago. The population boom in Williston and elsewhere continues to set records. The oil industry employs more than 30,000 people and could exceed 100,000 if production rises as expected to a million barrels a day. There are so many job openings...

Energy Policy: After presidential lobbying, the Senate fell four votes short of taking a giant step toward energy independence as gas prices and unemployment rise. In the White House, everything is going according to plan. The 56-42 vote defeated a proposal by Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., that would have granted approval of the pipeline without any further environmental reviews by the State Department. It came after President Obama personally called lawmakers to lobby for the Hoeven amendment's defeat. Sixty votes were needed for passage to avoid a filibuster. As we've said, you have to watch what Obama does, not what...

Energy: At a plant that makes natural-gas-powered trucks, the president proposes still more alternative-energy subsidies. The privately developed technology that lowered the price of natural gas can lower gasoline prices too. It was a tad surreal to see President Obama, champion of green energy and unions, visiting a foreign-owned manufacturer of natural gas-powered trucks in a right-to-work state. But there he was Wednesday, at the Daimler Trucks North America truck factory in Mount Holly, N.C., touting vehicles powered by a fossil fuel produced by drilling. The president, who recently touted pond scum as an energy source of the future, embraced...

Energy: Industry leaders gathered in Houston say rising fuel output comes in spite of, not because of, the president's policies and the pain at the pump will soon be excruciating. Energy executives and other industry players gathered for the North American Prospect Expo (NAPE) in Houston shredded administration assertions that it is opening up areas for oil and gas exploration and that its policies are responsible for increased oil and gas production on President Obama's watch. "These have been the most difficult three years from a policy standpoint that I've ever seen in my career," Bruce Vincent, president of Houston...

BISMARCK The preliminary November data released Tuesday by the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division indicates North Dakota now is producing more than half a million barrels of oil per day. That's about 510,000 barrels produced a day in the month of November. "This is big news for the state and the country. A half a million barrels a day represents about 10 percent of U.S. production. That's enough oil to displace imports from Iraq or Columbia," said Lynn Helms, Bismarck, director of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, in a news release issued Tuesday. The Oil and Gas...

Energy Independence: As our enemy Iran threatens to close a vital waterway for the shipping of oil, plans for a secure, job-creating supply from our ally Canada gather dust on the president's desk. The blustering threat from the quite mad Iranian mullahs and their supremely mad leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may be just a bluff, but then again it might not. It may just be an attempt to intimidate and poke the eye of an American president perceived as weak and whose failure to support and exploit the "Iranian Spring" of 2009 may come back to bite us. These are not...

Enbridge Inc. has received regulatory approval for its Bakken Pipeline project, adding much needed capacity out of the prolific and pipeline-constrained U.S. play. The $180-million pipeline will move crude from the Bakken and Three Forks formations in Montana and North Dakota to Cromer, Man., via a new pump station at Steelman, Sask. “We’re pleased to receive the board’s approval of our Canadian Bakken project and to be able to move forward with this component of our broader expansion plans in the Bakken in both Canada and in North Dakota,” Perry Schuldhaus, Enbridge vice-president of regional pipeline development, said today. “The...

New Energy: The latest salvo in the administration's war on energy may be new rules and permits to regulate a process to get oil and gas from porous rock, sacrificing jobs and economic growth while under review. There are a few areas of the U.S. that are booming. Two of these are in North Dakota and Pennsylvania, states that sit atop two massive shale rock formations, the Bakken and the Marcellus. Extraction of oil and natural gas from these formations have created jobs and economic growth in the midst of a stagnant and parched economy. The oil and gas is...

Jim Stout, an English professor at Williston State College in Williston N.D., started losing some of his best students to the oil fields last year. It was too hard to compete: The students could either spend thousands of dollars on a college education or earn $100,000 a year working on the rigs, performing maintenance on oil wells or driving trucks. "At some point they decide, 'Well, college will always be here ... but the oil boom won't,'" he said. One engineering student dropped out of college last winter to take a job boiling the water used in hydraulic fracturing. In...

Norway's Statoil will build more crude shipping capacity in the Williston Basin of North Dakota and Montana as part of its $4.4 billion bid for Austin-based Brigham Exploration a company executive said on Monday. The Norwegian state oil company said it would build more shipping capacity, with a focus on pipelines, but did not commit itself to any specific pipeline project. Analysts said that because of the deal's steep cost, the oil major will have to invest in infrastructure projects to recover some of its investment as it ramps up production. Statoil is looking to enter the Bakken and Three...

North Dakota is poised to surpass California and Alaska to become the nation's No. 2 oil producer behind Texas. North Dakota's rise in oil production from the Bakken and Three Forks shale formations has propelled it from the nation's ninth-biggest oil producer to fourth since 2006. ... North Dakota is producing about 444,000 barrels daily.

Believe it or not, a place exists where companies are hiring like crazy, and you can make $15 an hour serving tacos, $25 an hour waiting tables and $80,000 a year driving trucks. You just have to move to North Dakota. Specifically, to one of the tiny towns surrounding the oil-rich Bakken formation, estimated to hold anywhere between 4 billion and 24 billion barrels of oil. Oil companies have only recently discovered ways to tap this reserve. And along with the manpower needed to extract the oil, the town is now scrambling to find workers to support the new rush...

Mr. Hamm was one of the pioneers of this method in the 1990s, and it has done for the oil industry what hydraulic fracturing has done for natural gas drilling in places like the Marcellus Shale in the Northeast. Both innovations have unlocked decades worth of new sources of domestic fossil fuels that previously couldn't be extracted at affordable cost. Mr. Hamm's rags to riches success is the quintessential "only in America" story. He was the last of 13 kids, growing up in rural Oklahoma "the son of sharecroppers who never owned land." He didn't have money to go to...

North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation. 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.

The Bakken oil boom has bolstered North Dakota's employment rate and tax revenues, but also has created a number of challenges for state and local government as well as producers operating in the Bakken, according to a report by the Energy Policy Research Foundation. North Dakota has been an oil producing state for 60 years, but only during the past three years has the Bakken boom made North Dakota the fourth largest oil producing state in the U.S. and one of the largest onshore plays in the country. The success of the Bakken, which the U.S. Geological Survey estimated in...

San Antonio-based refiner Tesoro Corp. said Friday it will spend $50 million to boost its delivery of North Dakota Bakken shale crude oil to its Anacortes, Wash., refinery. The improvements will boost delivery of Bakken crude to as much as 30,000 barrels a day from the 1,000 to 2,000 barloading rels a day the plant receives now. More Bakken crude will make up for declining Alaska North Slope production and replace more costly imported oil Tesoro must buy for the plant, the company said. “The primary benefit to Tesoro is the lower feedstock cost by railing it to their refinery...

Bismarck, North Dakota — In recent weeks, North Dakota has been in the news because of the historic and damaging flooding of the Missouri and Souris Rivers. But as the waters subside, it's worth focusing on the state's economy. For at a time of stagnant wages and a high unemployment rate, this vast, lightly populated Peace Garden State is one of the few places in America where jobs are plentiful. In May nonfarm payroll employment was up 4.3 percent from the year before, and the unassuming state sported a gaudy 3.2 percent unemployment rate. In several counties, the rate is...

The US' Bakken Shale oil field, which spans Montana and North Dakota, has become so prolific that at least one big independent operator there estimates industry's output potential there at a whopping 1.2 million b/d by year-end 2016.That's a heck of a lot of oil for a play that was barely breathing six or seven years ago. And that figure is even higher than the 700,000 b/d or so North Dakota officials were citing as a  peak awhile back.  Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm, presenting his estimate of a Bakken peak of 1.2 million b/d at Platts' Rockies Gas & Oil...

When it comes to choosing sides in the debate over TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline, the American media seems every bit as divided as U.S. members of Congress and the Obama administration. In its lead editorial on Sunday, the New York Times urged President Barack Obama to reject construction of the 3,200-kilometres pipeline from Alberta to Texas because the project is “not only environmentally risky, it is unnecessary.” The Times editorialists took a sharply different view of Calgary-based TransCanada’s Keystone XL project than one of its major news competitors — the Washington Post — did when it weighed in on...

North Dakota, the state with the nation's lowest unemployment rate, capped a decade of economic prosperity with dramatic population growth in its biggest cities. North Dakota's low unemployment rate and steady housing market helped towns like Fargo, pictured, grow dramatically. Fargo added nearly 15,000 residents to hit a record population of 105,549, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday. Its fast-growing neighbor of West Fargo added an additional 11,000 residents to reach a population of 25,830. Fargo has seen steady growth over the decade — the housing boom missed it — to reach a size that surprised city officials. "Above 100,000? Wow....

Living on the harsh, wind-swept northern Great Plains, North Dakotans lean towards the practical in economic development. Finding themselves sitting on prodigious pools of oil—estimated by the state's Department of Mineral Resources at least 4.3 billion barrels—they are out drilling like mad. And the state is booming. Unemployment is 3.8%, and according to a Gallup survey last month, North Dakota has the best job market in the country. Its economy "sticks out like a diamond in a bowl of cherry pits," says Ron Wirtz, editor of the Minneapolis Fed's newspaper, fedgazette. The state's population, slightly more than 672,000, is up...

HOUSTON (CNNMoney) -- In the grasslands of western North Dakota, one of the country's richest oil men is using a controversial gas drilling technology to develop what could be the biggest domestic oil discovery in the last 40 years. The oil lies underground in a shale rock formation stretching across western North Dakota, northeast Montana, and into Canada's Saskatchewan Provence known as the Bakken. EIA thinks it will produce 350,000 barrels a day by 2035, but most analysts think that estimate is far too low. . .

Energy: The brightest hope for America's energy independence has been shut down by an Interior Department that says it wants to review the rules for leases. It really wants to kill off oil altogether. The game is this: Say that you want to find domestic oil and gas in a "smart" way, so you have to study things for a while. Then let enviros tie you up in court to block what you really don't want to do anyway, increase America's supply of domestic energy, keeping jobs and money here. On Tuesday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that the Obama...

Print Email Save Share Continental: Bakken's giant scope underappreciated Feb 16, 2011 By OGJ editors HOUSTON, Feb. 16 -- The Bakken play in the Williston basin could become the world’s largest discovery in the last 30-40 years, a senior manager at Continental Resources Inc. said Feb. 16. Ultimate recovery from the overall play is now estimated at 24 billion bbl of oil, compared with US reserves of nearly 20 billion bbl, he told the NAPE Expo in Houston. The 24 billion bbl figure is five times the US Geological Survey’s 2008 estimate and compares with the 151 million bbl the...

The Bakken play in the Williston basin could become the world’s largest discovery in the last 30-40 years, a senior manager at Continental Resources Inc. said Feb. 16. Ultimate recovery from the overall play is now estimated at 24 billion bbl of oil, compared with US reserves of nearly 20 billion bbl, he told the NAPE Expo in Houston. The 24 billion bbl figure is five times the US Geological Survey’s 2008 estimate and compares with the 151 million bbl the survey put forth as recently as the mid-1990s, said Jack Stark, Continental senior vice-president, exploration (OGJ, Apr. 21, 2008,...

A new drilling technique is opening up vast fields of previously out-of-reach oil in the western United States, helping reverse a two-decade decline in domestic production of crude. Companies are investing billions of dollars to get at oil deposits scattered across North Dakota, Colorado, Texas and California. By 2015, oil executives and analysts say, the new fields could yield as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day -- more than the entire Gulf of Mexico produces now. ... In the Bakken formation, production is rising so fast there is no space in pipelines to bring the oil to...

Oil prices have come off recent highs, but remain above $85 a barrel. That provides plenty of margin for domestic oil plays Concho Resources (CXO) and Northern Oil & Gas (NOG). Chinese solar products maker JinkoSolar(JKS) likely delivered another of triple-digit profit and sales growth. El Paso Pipeline Partners (EPB) has enjoyed solid growth amid relatively low natural gas prices. All four are part of the IBD 50, the high-powered list of superior stocks based on fundamental and technical factors.

A new drilling technique is opening up vast fields of previously out-of-reach oil in the western United States, helping reverse a two-decade decline in domestic production of crude.

BISMARCK - North Dakota's oil patch is setting more records with 1,676 new permits issued for oil and/or gas wells drilling in calendar year 2010, according to Bruce Hicks, assistant director of the N.D. Oil and Gas Division in Bismarck. That is more than 1,000 permits more than were issued in calendar year 2009 when 623 permits were issued. In 2008, the division issued 1,043 permits. The previous record was set in calendar year 1981 when 1,098 permits were issued, Hicks said Tuesday. "It appears 2011 will set another permitting record," Hicks said. "It is anticipated that between 160 to...

APNewsBreak: ND oil patch may double production APNewsBreak: Officials say North Dakota's oil patch poised to double production ap * Share * retweet * Email * Print James Macpherson, Associated Press, On Sunday January 2, 2011, 3:30 pm EST BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) -- Government and industry officials believe North Dakota's oil patch contains more than twice the amount of oil previously estimated and that the state's already record crude production will double within the decade. If the forecast is correct, North Dakota could leapfrog in a few years from the fourth-biggest oil producing state to No. 2, trailing only Texas....

Recovery: While states like Nevada wallow in recession, tiny North Dakota becomes the first state rated as expanding by a leading service. Could it be the state's burgeoning energy industry? The recession — induced by Democrats and activists meddling in the housing market through the Community Reinvestment Act and then whistling past the bad-loan graveyard of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — officially ended in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. For much of the country, mired in a jobless recovery with job losses so great and prospects so bleak that it will take decades just...

Even though it hovers at the western edge of the Bakken, Baker, Montana is being focused upon as “the hub of the Williston Basin.” Baker is where oil companies are headquartering and where pipelines are intersecting. What’s happening in the Bakken and the resurgence of eastern Montana oil fields dominated much of the discussion at the recent Montana Petroleum Association (MPA) Conference in Billings. “The whole industry has sparked up,” said Dave Galt, MPA Executive Director, because of ever improving technology that allows more production from wells once considered depleted. The industry is once again, “interested in investing in Montana,”...

Enbridge plans to expand its Montana to Saskatchewan light oil pipeline to accommodate growing production from prolific Bakken and Three Forks formations, the Calgary-based company said Tuesday. The $543 million project, forwarded by affiliates Enbridge Energy Partners on the U.S. side and Enbridge Income Trust in Canada, will boost volume on the line by 145,000 barrels per day to 325,000 bpd. Burgeoning production from the light sweet crude play prompted the latest expansion of the Bakken pipeline, which runs from Montana, through North Dakota, into Saskatchewan to Cormer, Manitoba. "We are confident that this series of expansions will relieve much...

North Dakota overtook Oklahoma this week as the third most active state in drilling for oil and natural gas, according to data published by Baker Hughes Inc. The number of North Dakota rigs exploring for and producing oil and gas jumped by two to 128, Baker Hughes said. Oklahoma fell by nine to 123, the biggest drop among the states. Oklahoma is home to the oil delivery hub for the U.S. Midcontinent. Drilling in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota's Williston Basin helped make the state the fourth-largest oil producer as of March.

Very little has been written about the Bakken Formation and the rich oil reservoir just beneath it in western North Dakota. This recently discovered oil depository potentially holds 1.9 billion barrels in the Three Forks-Sanish formation. For years, the oil industry have known about this oil field, but it was too costly to explore and the technology was not yet available. That is all changing now. The question is whether the EPA, environmentalists and our oppressive government will allow the exploration and harvesting of this tremendous resource that would greatly aid the US in their need for cheap, accessible energy...

Subject: US oil Wake up America - - - makes you wonder what we are waiting for!!!!   More oil kings having solid white gold Mercedes built with American money????        OIL Here ' s an interesting read, important and verifiable information : About 6 months ago, the writer was watching a news program on oil andone of the Forbes Bros. was the guest. The host said to Forbes, "I am going toask you a direct question and I would like a direct answer; how much oildoes the U.S. have in the ground?" Forbes did not miss a beat, he said,...

On April 1, the Obama administration’s EPA issued final rules forcing automakers to increase their vehicles’ fuel economy by 40 percent in five years. The next day, the very same EPA favorably reviewed an ethanol fuel mandate that would force autos to get up to 5 percent worse fuel economy. You can’t make this stuff up. Follow us here. By the same date — 2015 — that the new 35.5 mpg EPA mandate is due to go into effect, oil companies are also mandated by Congress to double the amount of corn ethanol use (from 2007 levels) to 15 billion...

North Dakota topped the century mark in the number of active oil rigs this week for the first time since February 1982. There were 102 active rigs as of Wednesday. The state is still below the all-time high of 146 rigs that came in October 1981, said Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council. Ness said the numbers are a positive for the future of the North Dakota oil industry. Ness said improvements in technology have allowed rigs to be more productive and efficient with the advent of horizontal drilling. “That’s the real story,” he said. Ness said...

Although most of the oil and gas exploration and development activity in the Bakken Shale so far has been on the North Dakota side, the next few years may see a pick up in activity on the Montana side, where several exploration and production companies are planning test wells and assembling acreage. Looking North Rosetta Resources (Nasdaq:ROSE) has 239,000 net acres under lease in the Alberta Basin in the Cut Bank field. The company has drilled three test wells here to date and has been encouraged by the results. Rosetta Resources has found pay at several different formations besides the...

OIL - you better sit down. Here's an interesting read, important and verifiable information : About 6 months ago, the writer was watching a news program on oil and one of the Forbes Bros. was the guest. The host said to Forbes, "I am going to ask you a direct question and I would like a direct answer; how much oil does the U.S. have in the ground?" Forbes did not miss a beat, he said, "more than all the Middle East put together." Please read below. The U. S. Geological Service issued a report in April 2008 that only...