What little furry creature will prevent the drilling this time?

[Sound_Man]

An increase by ten fold of our current reserves... I wonder how this will play out.

HighWizard notes the upcoming release (http://www.kxmc.com/News/226287.asp), on Thursday, of a report by the US Geological Survey on the Bakken Formation. This is an oil field covering 200,000 square miles and underlying parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. A geologist who began surveying the field (http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/1318522/research_on_bakken_formations_oil_reserves_nearly_completed/), before dying in 2000, believed it may hold as much as 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Later estimates have ranged to the hundreds of billions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakken_Formation) of barrels. Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/08/2111201

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakken_Formation

http://www.kxmc.com/News/226287.asp

[MountainJeep]

Its another oil shale formation. Not very promising utilizing affordable technologies for extraction.

Not to excited about the prospect of horizontal drilling the fractures...but hey, I am 20 years removed from my last petrogeo class...

[zillacon]

They have been doing some testing on my Moms old homestead in ND that we have mineral rights for. Hopefully they find some but the checks are still good just for testing.

[MountainJeep]

interesting read

http://www.nd.gov/ndic/ic-press/bakken-form-06.pdf

[Yota]

The Bakken has been on production for a long long time.

But it is a shale and shales have notoriously low permeability. That means that liquids like oil and water will not flow through them very easily. So they can be present but not mobile.

The typical technique is to drill a horizontal well through the shale because typically shales are more permeable in the horizontal direction than in the vertical direction. This method and hydraulic fracturing (pumping sand-laden fluid at high rates and pressures to create a large, thin crack that gets propped open by the sand) have had some success in the Bakken.

But estimates of reserves and ultimate recovery are hard to quantify because of the production difficulties. And the costs to get at that production is higher than average.

[CannonBall]

... but at $111/barrel, I'm thinking they can make plenty of money.
-Nate

[Oscar]

I remember back in the 70/80's the magic number was 32 dollars a barrel when the westslope was being built up for the oil shale. Don't know what that number would be in todays dollars.

[MinesJeep]

Most shales are in the $60-70/bbl to be economical.

[Oscar]

ok beside the amount of water needed why is the greenriver formation not being mined?

[Yota]

The break-even price varies, ironically, with price.

The reason is that the higher product prices go, the higher service prices go too just because of the increased demand. It's not quite a 1:1 relationship but there is a cause and effect there. There is also a lag between product price changes and service price changes though, which is why a sudden change in product prices can help or hurt a company's bottom line in a big way.

But yes, shales are twice or more as costly to produce economically as more "conventional" reservoir rocks like limestone, sandstone, dolomite, etc.

[TwoDogs]

OMFG!!! Drilling will wipe out the two left legged, shiney hiney, bass ackwards jackalope!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!! :D

[Sound_Man]

OMFG!!! Drilling will wipe out the two left legged, shiney hiney, bass ackwards jackalope!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!! :D

ZOMG!!!11!!!!ELEVENTY!!

Someone finally came up with a reason not to do it!


:flipoff2: