[TheBagman]

Huge ocean of crude lies 2 miles below North America | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

John Bartelson, who smokes Marlboro Lights through fingers blackened with tractor grease, may look like an average wheat farmer. He isn't. He's one of North Dakota's new oil barons.

Every month, he gets a check for tens of thousands of dollars from Houston company EOG Resources, which drilled two oil wells on his land last year. He says the day his first royalty check arrived was one to remember.

"I smiled to beat hell, and I went to town and had a beer," Bartelson, 65, says.

His new wealth springs from the Bakken formation, a sprawling deposit of high-quality crude beneath the durum wheat fields of North Dakota, Montana and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The Bakken may give the U.S. — the world's biggest importer of oil — a new domestic energy source.

Unlike the tar from Canada's oil sands, Bakken crude needs little refining. Swirl some of it in a Mason jar and it leaves a thin, honey-colored film along the sides. It's light — almost like gasoline — and sweet, meaning it's low in sulfur.

Best of all, the Bakken could be huge. The U.S. Geological Survey's Leigh Price, a Denver geochemist who died in 2000, estimated that the Bakken might hold 413 billion barrels. If so, it would dwarf Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, the world's biggest field, which has produced about 55 billion barrels.

Better technology
The challenge is getting the oil out. Bakken crude is locked two miles underground in a layer of dolomite, a dense mineral that doesn't surrender oil the way more porous limestone does. The dolomite band is narrow, too, averaging just 22 feet in North Dakota.

The USGS said in April that the Bakken holds as much as 4.3 billion barrels that can be recovered using today's engineering techniques. That's a fraction of the oil that Price said should be there, but it's still the largest accumulation of crude in the 48 contiguous U.S. states. North Dakota, where Bakken exploration is most intense now, won't become Saudi Arabia unless technology improves.

For decades, the Bakken was the fool's gold of the oil industry. The name describes a geological formation that looks like an Oreo cookie: two layers of black shale that bleed oil into the middle layer of dolomite. It's named after Henry O. Bakken, the North Dakota farmer who owned the land where the first drilling rig revealed the shale layers in the 1950s.

All of the layers are thin — about 150 feet altogether — and none of them give up oil easily. In older, vertical wells, oil would often flow for a month and then fizzle.

Different angle
Now, companies like EOG are drilling horizontally. They go straight down 10,000 feet and then put a slight angle in the mud motor, a 30-foot piece of tubing that drives the bit, so they hit the Bakken sideways, making a horizontal tunnel as much as 4,500 feet long through the dolomite.

Then they pump pressurized water and sand into the hole to fracture the dolomite, making cracks for oil to seep through.

It eventually winds up in a pipeline that runs east to Clearbrook, Minn., and then south to Chicago.

Several billionaires are at work in the Bakken. Harold Hamm's Enid, Okla.-based Continental Resources has leases on 487,000 acres in Montana and North Dakota. Hamm, who started out driving a truck, owns 73 percent of Continental, worth $7.9 billion.

The big winner so far has been EOG, formerly a subsidiary of bankrupt energy trader Enron Corp. It drilled a horizontal well in western North Dakota just north of Parshall — population 1,028 — in April 2006. The well came online a month later and kicked out 1,883 barrels in the first seven days. Unlike the older vertical wells, it's still going.

Northern Oil & Gas, a five-person company near Minneapolis, makes money without actually drilling or operating wells.

It leases in promising areas like the Bakken and gets paid when someone else uses the land to drill.

The other people doing well in the Bakken are the mineral owners under the oil wells — folks like John Bartelson. Oil drillers have paid them millions for right of access to the oil deposits.

"It'll crash again," Bartelson says, sipping on a late- afternoon cup of coffee beside his tractor.

Maybe so. But with crude trading above $130 a barrel, it'll be a long time before the rigs leave again, and John Bartelson is likely to be a wealthy man before they do.

[AnnonUSA]

The problem with these domestic oil fields is that they don't produce easily (as in cheaply). So while everyone will no doubt believe that we can give the Saudi's the finger, we can't. Most of the new Domestic oil "Reserves" are not cost effective to recover at prices below $100 a barrel or more. So Gasoline prices will need to remain high even though the oil is coming from below our own feet.

And if our domestic production takes money from the middle east, Opec and the Saudi's can increase production, lowering prices and stopping the whole "In our backyard" process.

The only real solution. long term, is to find alternative fuels that don't hurt food supplies and don't cost more in the way of environmental and dollar amounts. And we are still many years away from that.

The current Administration and the Congress have, via the Federal Reserve Bank, destroyed the American economy, in a knee jerk reaction to global terrorism. The Economic terrorists are now the biggest problem we face in the future, and those terrorists are elected by the American people themselves....

[FilLaB0NGo7]

price better be below $2.00/gallon before election day or there will be consequences

[AnnonUSA]

Originally Posted by FilLaB0NGo7

price better be below $2.00/gallon before election day or there will be consequences

The Price will be $3.25 a gallon in the few weeks leading up to the Elections in November. But they will spike again after the elections. (note: if McCain is leading in the polls, gas will be cheaper than if Obama is).

[elroypornlab]

You guys are fucked up gas is 4 dollars a gallon here

[AnnonUSA]

Originally Posted by elroypornlab

You guys are fucked up gas is 4 dollars a gallon here

Yeah, and your point is?

[TheBagman]

Gas is $4.19 here.

[AnnonUSA]

Regular is $3.95 to $4.10. Most people are switching to regular thinking it will save them money, but most cars will make less power, and get less MPG with 87 octane. So at best you would save a few cents per month.

[FilLaB0NGo7]

3.99 is the cheapest here

[elroypornlab]

Originally Posted by AnnonUSA

Yeah, and your point is?

My point is any pipe dream about fuel prices dropping are just that

[TheDriver]

4.55 for regular here

[AnnonUSA]

Originally Posted by elroypornlab

My point is any pipe dream about fuel prices dropping are just that

For at least the last three years Gas prices have dropped an average of 50 to 70 cents a gallon in September, October and the first week and a half of November. The "experts" will tell you it's because the "demand" dies down after the summer, and that may play a little part, but the truth is that Big Oil Companies and the Oil commodities traders ease off and try to influence voters towards republican candidates.

For Business I keep a log of all miles and fuel purchased and prices have dropped every year before elections and they go right back up again within days of the National Election.

Keep your ears open and you will surely hear republicans taking credit for driving down fuel costs shortly before elections.

[TacoSusio]

ragheads will counter any effort to significantly lower gas prices. it may be $4.25 by nov, but $3.25?! lol those days are long gone...