Free Republic

In the April 17 edition of Forbes, contributor Josh Barro cited an astonishing jump in North Dakota tax collections in 2011 due to the recent oil and gas boom in the northern plains state. Citing U.S. Census Bureau report on 2011 state tax collections figures, Barro said tax collections in North Dakota have soared — up 44.4 percent over 2010, all on the strength of the oil and gas boom in the Bakken shale formation. Severance taxes (taxes on natural resource extraction) leaped 65 percent from year to year and now make up 49 percent of the state’s tax collections....

Exxon Mobil Corp. is starting work with Russia's OAO Rosneft in assessing what could be massive reserves of shale oil in Western Siberia, the U.S. giant's Chief Executive Rex Tillerson said Tuesday. "There is huge shale potential in shale rocks in West Siberia...we just don't know what the quality is," Mr. Tillerson said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires. The exploration work will take years to establish if the reserves are commercially viable, and are part of a strategic agreement Exxon reached earlier this year with state-controlled Rosneft, Russia's largest oil producer. "Rosneft wished to participate in some resource...

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote a story about a family that discovered a diamond as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel sitting beneath a mountain in a remote corner of Montana. The big rock presented a great dilemma. Selling off tiny pieces could yield a massive fortune. But if the world uncovered its existence, diamond prices would plummet. To maintain their secret -- and an artificial scarcity in diamonds -- the family became tyrants, imposing absolute control over five square miles of Montana. Involuntary servitude, extrajudicial incarceration and old-fashioned homicide were just some of the tools they used the keep their...

A stretch of largely vacant federal lands in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado may hold more recoverable oil than all the rest of the world put together. That is what Anu Mittal, Director of Natural Resources for the General Accounting Office, informed the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment in her written testimony on May 10: The Green River Formation — an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — contains the world's largest deposits of oil shale. USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] estimates that the Green River Formation contains...

Video at link Rock Springs, Wyo. (BLM Photo) (CNSNews.com) - The Green River Formation, a largely vacant area of mostly federal land that covers the territory where Colorado, Utah and Wyoming come together, contains about as much recoverable oil as all the rest the world’s proven reserves combined, an auditor from the Government Accountability Office told Congress on Thursday. The GAO testimony stressed that the federal government was in “a unique position to influence the development of oil shale” because the Green River deposits were mostly beneath federal land. It also noted that developing the oil would pose “socioeconomic challenges,”...

Energy: Cutting our reliance on oil from unstable regions is a good idea if not a necessity. But that crude won't be replaced by algae or biofuel. To be more independent, we need to go to the well one more time — back to Texas. The Lone Star State is not a favorite of the environmentalists and their political-media allies. But it has long been a rich source of oil that drives our economy. While other states — particularly North Dakota and Alaska — have become more newsworthy for their oil production, Texas wells aren't yet dry. The Eagle Ford...

In a straight line, they’re 4,200 miles apart. And they’re years apart in commercializing their resources. But, even if they’re not in the same geographical and time zone, the Canol shale in the Central Mackenzie Valley of the Northwest Territories and the heart of the Bakken in North Dakota have a common bloodline. The Bakken is already living proof of the success new technology has in spawning a new generation hydrocarbon basin. The Canol shale shares that ambition to become a game changer, turning Canada’s North into a major unconventional oil and natural gas producer. While the Bakken pushes boldly...

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...

U.S. oil production is enjoying a renaissance, thanks to new technology that has made oil recovery possible in tight shale rock. The busy Bakken formation in North Dakota and Montana is the largest and best-known oil shale play. The Eagle Ford in South Texas and the Barnett "combo play" (gas and oil) in North Texas are also fairly famous unconventional plays. But the Wolfcamp Shale? "Over the next two or three years, everybody is going to be making a beeline to the Wolfcamp," said Scott Sheffield, chief executive of Pioneer Natural Resources. Spanning numerous counties across West Texas, the Wolfcamp...

When he was running for the Oval Office four years ago amid $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, then-Sen. Barack Obama dismissed the idea of expanded oil production as a way to relieve the pain at the pump. "Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling," he said. "America still has only 3% of the world's oil reserves." Which meant, he said, that the U.S. couldn't affect global oil prices....But the figure Obama uses — proved oil reserves — vastly undercounts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the...

The federal government is holding the first of several public meetings on plans for oil shale development on public lands that would keep activity off thousands of acres of environmentally sensitive areas in three Western states. Under the proposal, new leases initially would be issued strictly for research on how to commercially produce oil from oil shale in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.The first meeting is being held Monday in Silt to discuss the environmental impact and the different options that have been announced.The George W. Bush administration made almost 2 million acres available for potential oil shale development and 431,000...

A funny thing is happening on the way to the clean energy future–reality is setting in. There is ‘incontrovertible evidence’ about the economic growth and job creating effects of America’s unconventional oil and gas production boom – more than 600,000 jobs directly attributable to shale gas development. Even President Obama is praising the job creating benefits of ‘America’s resource boom’. America is getting its energy mojo back and that is good news but not the entire story. How Much Shale Gas is there in the United States? In July 2011 US EIA released a [Review of Emerging Resources: US Shale...

The US Bureau of Land Management published a draft programmatic environmental impact statement and possible land use amendments for federally administered oil shale and tar sands acreage in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. It also opened a 90-day comment period on the proposals on Feb. 3. The draft PEIS analyzes several land allocation and resource management alternatives, the US Department of the Interior agency noted. It said if it decides to adopt the preferred alternative, 461,965 acres would be available for research and development of oil shale (35,308 acres in Colorado, 252,181 acres in Utah, and 174,476 acres in Wyoming), and...

The Bureau of Land Management on Friday proposed scaling back a George W. Bush-era plan for development of oil shale and tar sands on Western lands, drawing the ire of Republicans and industry groups. The plan would reduce the available acreage for oil-shale and tar-sands development by about three-fourths in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming in an attempt to protect environmentally sensitive areas. It also would pull back the Bush-era proposal to make oil-shale leases available for commercial development, instead continuing to lease them only for research-and-experimentation purposes. BLM announced last year it would redo the Bush-era plan as part of...

“If independent U.S. oil producers are right, last year was only a taste of the transformation that is coming to America’s oilpatch. Some optimists are already forecasting huge increases by 2015, perhaps taking U.S. oil production up by some two million barrels per day to 8 million bpd by then. Both the expertise of the industry and huge amounts of investment capital are already moving into less established shale plays hoping to replicate the success that has already materialized in North Dakota and Texas, which put these places on oil traders’ lips as the unprecedented slump in West Texas Intermediate...

Enbridge Energy Partners LP (EEP) will expand its Berthold rail terminal capacity in the Bakken shale by 80,000 b/d and include a rail car loading facility to accommodate the additional volume. EEP has contractual commitments for 70% of the rail loading capacity and anticipates it will soon finalize agreements for the remaining capacity. The Berthold Rail Project includes construction of a double-loop unit-train facility, crude oil tankage, and other terminal facilities adjacent to its existing facilities near Berthold, ND. The project will have capacity to stage three unit-trains at Berthold at any given time. After an initial 10,000 b/d Phase...

BHP Billiton plans to invest roughly US $4.5 billion developing the shale oil and gas assets it bought in the U.S. this financial year as it ramps up production, the head of the mining company's petroleum division said Monday. BHP expects capital spending to jump to almost US $6 billion in the 2015 fiscal year and roughly US $6.5 billion by 2020 as the company ramps up the number of rigs on its four project areas, Michael Yeager said in a conference call from Melbourne. BHP spent almost US $17 billion this year buying Petrohawk Energy Corp. along with its...

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.