Monday - April 14, 2008

A Crude Posting

Sorry folks, I’ve got stuff to do today. I guess we could have one of those Open Thread things that all the cool blogs have when they run of idea to post about.

I’ll tell you what I’d like to post about, if I had the time. That USGS survey released last week about all the oil hiding in the Bakken Formation up in North Dakota. A few weeks ago this was all wild speculation, though oilmen have known there is oil there since the 1950s. Now the report has come out (with wild rumors that it was actually done several years ago, but got sat on because the author died before he got proper peer review), and the conservative estimate is that there are BILLIONS of barrels of oil there. Recoverable ones, not just calculated quantities. The problem is that the oil is deep, 10,000 feet down and more. But angular or horizontal drilling could get to it. Or could it? Will they even be allowed to drill? Will the enviro-idiots have a fit? Will Native Americans try and claim the whole pie since the oil is under “Ancestral Lands”?

“Technology continues to advance”, Dorgan said Monday. “This is not going to be a red light or green light about oil development in the Bakken—clearly there already is a big green light there. But I think the question is pretty clear: How much of that oil is recoverable using today’s technology?”

A new black gold rush is under way, this time in North Dakota. The potential payoff is huge—up to 100 billion barrels of oil. That’s twice the size of Alaska’s reserves and potentially enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for two decades.

Until now, the obstacles to production seemed overwhelming. The crude oil is locked away in rocks that are buried miles underground in the Bakken Play, a field that stretches into Montana and Saskatchewan, Canada.

But times have changed. High oil prices and new technology make it worth the effort. Computer analysis and remote sensing systems, plus smart drills that can probe horizontally or snake left and right, vastly improve the odds of locating new pools and

The government estimated Thursday that up to 4.3 billion barrels of oil can be recovered from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota and Montana, using current technology.  The U.S. Geological Survey called it the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed.

The Bakken Formation encompasses some 25,000 square miles in North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. About two-thirds of the acreage is in western North Dakota, where the oil is trapped in a thin layer of dense rock nearly two miles beneath the surface. Companies use pressurized fluid and sand to break pores in the rock and prop them open to recover the oil.

So, what do you think is going to happen? Will someone finally get their butt off the pot and get something done? We’ll need a local refinery or two for this field. Build it. We’ll need quite a lot of pipeline. Build them. I’ve been listening to the hot air coming out of government for almost 40 years about our “energy policy”. Alternate fuels, alternate sources, clean coal, hydrogen power, advancing technology through research, blah blah blah blah BLAH. Times up. FORTY YEARS worth of expensive research. Well, here’s a liquid goldmine, hiding under some of the roughest and least inhabited parts of our nation. GET TO WORK. Take two weeks of spending away from the “War on Terror”, the “War on Drugs”, and “No Child Left Behind” and you’ll have plenty of money to spend on it. I’m all for private business, but maybe, just maybe, “energy” is something that ought to be nationalized? Sound off folks!

Posted by Drew458     on 04/14/2008 at 08:05 AM   
Filed Under: • News-Briefs • Science-Technology •  
• Comments (9) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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