Free Republic

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...

Maybe Hubbert’s Peak isn’t the tallest mountain after all. North American oil production will hit a new all-time high by 2016 given the current pace of drilling in the U.S. and Canada, according to a study released by an energy research firm this week. U.S. oil production in areas like the Permian Basin, the Eagle Ford, Bakken and others will rise by a little over 2 million barrels per day between 2010 and 2016, according to data compiled by Bentek Energy, a Colorado firm that tracks energy infrastructure and production projects. It’s a reversal of the steady downward production trend...

Prospectors in Israel say hundreds of feet below the ground lies shale rock that can be converted into billions of barrels of oil. But environmentalists say it's a disaster waiting to happen."This is the distinct smell I'm talking about when I talk about oil shale." > In recent years, big natural gas deposits were discovered off the coast, but the country still imports much of its gas from its neighbour to the south, Egypt. That supply is precarious. This year it was interrupted by a string of attacks on gas pipelines running through the Sinai desert. And concerns remain about...

Two years ago, America was importing about two thirds of its oil. Today, according to the Energy Information Administration, it imports less than half. And by 2017, investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts the US could be poised to pass Saudi Arabia and overtake Russia as the world's largest oil producer. Places like Williston are the reason why. "For many years, they knew that there was oil in that area, but the technology wasn't available to get it out," the town's mayor, Ward Koeser, tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. But in the last few years, advances in...

NuStar Energy LP and Valero Energy Corp. have agreed that NuStar will add to its pipeline system to enable Valero to transport more crude oil from the rapidly developing Eagle Ford shale to three of its South Texas refineries. The changes will help Valero transport more crude to its plants in Three Rivers and Corpus Christi, where it has two refineries. The deal between the two San Antonio-based companies “is part of a larger project to optimize our pipelines in South Texas,” NuStar spokeswoman Mary Rose Brown said, as part of improvements expected to cost $135 million to $150 million....

Maybe you've seen the advertisements from various financial newsletters touting the investment potential of companies involved in developing the Bakken oil shale formation that spreads across North Dakota and Montana and into the neighboring Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The claims, which several years ago appeared outrageous, of the Bakken containing eight times the amount of oil as in Saudi Arabia or 21-times the reserves held by Kuwait seem less than fantasy today. These newsletters began trumpeting the financial impact of the Bakken for various oil exploration companies active in the formation following the 2008 U.S. Geological Service (USGS)...

New data suggests Israel may not only have much larger gas resources than believed, but also the 3rd largest deposit of oil shale in the world. Libyan oil accounts for less than 2 percent of world oil production, yet the revolt against Muammar Gaddafi has managed to shoot up the price of oil to more than $100 per barrel in the last month. No one knows how long the internal instability in the Middle East will last, but according to the US Department of Energy, its share of the world’s total oil supply is expected to actually increase in the...

Readers have been asking questions about a couple of shale oil articles recently. One is an AP article called New drilling method opens vast oil fields in US. A similar article is a CNBC article titled Massive New US Oil Supply – ‘Peak Oil’ Fears Overblown? Both of these articles talk about the extraction of shale oil in the Bakken and other locations, using horizontal wells and hydraulic fracturing. According to the AP article: 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,...

For many residents of this northeast Ohio hamlet, the oil bonanza began with a knock at the door. City Hall received a fax. Spit from that machine last summer was a mineral rights lease offer -- just like those being hand-delivered to homeowners -- from oil and gas explorer Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK). In the subsequent months Chesapeake's oil-field leasing agents swarmed the region, laying claim to what the company and others say may be one of the last big unconventional oil discoveries in the U.S. "It was a mad rush," said Mayor Rob Donham. Windham eventually sold Chesapeake the...

The Eagle Ford shale, a vast oil and natural gas play in South Texas, will become one of the state's fastest-growing areas for new business and job creation over the next decade, experts said Wednesday. That's if they can get the oil out. Pipelines already are full, and companies are having to truck it out or ship it by rail. Jumps in leased acreage and in drilling permits signal the rapid advance of the Eagle Ford as an energy-producing area, experts said at a meeting of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers in San Antonio. ... Drilling permits issued jumped...

... Spit from that machine last summer was a mineral rights lease offer -- just like those being hand-delivered to homeowners -- from oil and gas explorer Chesapeake. In the subsequent months Chesapeake's oil-field leasing agents swarmed the region, laying claim to what the company and others say may be one of the last big unconventional oil discoveries in the U.S. "It was a mad rush," said Mayor Rob Donham. Windham eventually sold Chesapeake the right to drill underneath 100 acres that hold the town's municipal buildings and ball fields for $55,000 -- enough to buy two new police cars...

LYNN AND TERRY COUNTY, TX (KCBD) - Advanced methods and technology have oil companies interested in drilling throughout several counties in our area. Land owners are receiving offers to lease mineral rights to the companies, and many of them are seeing big offers. Geologists think there is oil and natural gas in large shale formations underneath Hockley, Terry, Gaines, Dawson, and Lynn counties, and they want to get it out. If they're right, the economy of communities in these counties could change forever. "I don't think I'd have an opportunity in 3 or 4 lifetimes to see this," Bill McGowan...

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...

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,...

In response to a legal challenge by conservation groups, the Obama administration today launched a process to reconsider — and probably rewrite — a Bush-era plan for developing oil shale in the West. At issue are decisions by former President George W. Bush’s Interior Department to open roughly 2 million acres of land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming to commercial oil shale leasing, while also approving regulations setting royalty rates for eventual production that critics blasted as too low. Under a court settlement filed today, more than a dozen groups, including the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense...

Dr. Daniel Fine of the Mining and Minerals Resources Institute at MIT addressed Fletcher students at a talk sponsored by the International Security Studies Program and offered his insights into how the development of new technology will allow the United States to tap vast, previously inaccessible, resources of natural gas that will impact everything from the price of gasoline to the ability of Chinese companies to buy equity in Russian natural gas fields.

Energy Policy: As the job-killing deepwater drilling ban continues offshore, our interior secretary defends an onshore ban imposed in Utah. If we could drill in places like that, maybe oil wouldn't be gushing a mile under the Gulf of Mexico. The 64-million-gallon question in the Gulf oil spill is why we were drilling 5,000 feet down in the first place. The administration line, as expressed by the president in his recent Oval Office speech, is that oil resources on land and just offshore are running out. The falsity of that claim can be seen in the battle over 77 oil...

Tuesday night, following a tour of the Gulf Coast area, the President of the United States addressed the nation regarding the state of the BP oil spill. In his speech from the Oval Office, President Obama spoke regarding our nation's dependence upon oil and how we need to break that dependence. During his speech (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-nation-bp-oil-spill), the president made a statement that was blatantly false. The president noted, "We consume more than 20% of the world's oil, but have less than 2% of the world's oil reserve. And that's part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the...

The new Interior Department looks into a move to lock in beneficial royalties and regulations for companies with leases on public lands -- denounced by some as a massive giveaway to the oil industry. Reporting from Washington - The Obama Interior Department is reviewing a decision made by the Bush administration in its final days that attempted to lock in lucrative royalty rates and favorable regulations for oil companies holding leases for oil shale development on public lands.

Energy Policy: New York's governor wants to tap into a shale formation that can supply the entire U.S. with natural gas for 65 years. Will NIMBY environmentalists let him stimulate New York's and America's energy economy? Last week, David Patterson released a draft report of his Energy Planning Board that does something Democrats are loath to do: It proposes developing a domestic energy resource — the huge amounts of natural gas trapped in the Marcellus Shale formation. New York produces 5% of its natural gas in-state and imports more than 95% from the Gulf Coast and Canada. The Marcellus Shale...