Grossly Underrated
Posts: 6,278 
Location: In the bush somewhere near Sudbury
Location: In the bush somewhere near Sudbury
March 11th, 2008, 03:48 PM
Woof!
Quoting karrie
Oops.... Mickey mouse chart I was looking at looked like the oil field. Light dotted line (upon clarification) indicates Williston Basin.
No, the oil is in all of the shale. The map states that inside the dotted lines is the 'overpressured area'. I'd assume that to mean that it's where the oil has pooling and is thus freely available (not needing production to free it up and pull it out like in other areas), but I'm not certain. I'll have to ask hubby about it when he gets home.
Woof!
Electoral Member
Posts: 71
Location: Hither and yon
Location: Hither and yon
August 3rd, 2008, 06:44 AM
^
This is old, old news.
Everyone in the oil exploitation game has known about the Bakken for decades.
I drilled a multilateral Bakken well in North Dakota 18 years ago.
The bottom line is always the same: as the price of oil increases and improved production technology is introduced these old bypassed and overlooked reserviours
become potentially viable once again.
Thats all it is.
If oil hits $200/BBL you will hear about even more "New and Huge" discoverys.
Its all the expensive stuff and crumbs left behind that are becoming viable as the price increases.
Karrie has it pretty much spot on with her assesment of whats going on in the Bakken .
The formations are tight,low porosity with terrible effective permiability.
You need fairly long laterals or multilateral horizontal wells to start.
The improved packer hookups for doing stage frac's are really helping just like Karrie says.
I remember dropping balls down the pipe trying to plug the perfs and get a selective frac in the old days, things change and improve.
Having said all that multilaterals followed by complex completion and stimulation programs are expensive as hell.
But at $125 +/bbl it's looking good now.
The Bakken extends well under Sask so there is lots of acerage to drill on our side of the line.
The oil companies are busy picking it all over trying to find the " sweet spots".
Actually it's the "best of the worst" as it's a huge but crappy reseviour.
Trex
Quoting I think not
America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.
In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel.
It was not until 2007, when EOG Resources of Texas started a frenzy when they drilled a single well in Parshal N.D. that is expected to yield 700,000 barrels of oil that real excitement and money started to flow in North Dakota. Marathon Oil is investing $1.5 billion and drilling 300 new wells in what is expected to be one of the greatest booms in Oil discovery since Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.
The US imported about 14 million barrels of Oil per day in 2007 , which means US consumers sent about $340 Billion Dollars over seas building palaces in Dubai and propping up unfriendly regimes around the World, if 200 billion barrels of oil at $90 a barrel are recovered in the high plains the added wealth to the US economy would be $18 Trillion Dollars which would go a long way in stabilizing the US trade deficit and could cut the cost of oil in half in the long run.
Link
In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel.
It was not until 2007, when EOG Resources of Texas started a frenzy when they drilled a single well in Parshal N.D. that is expected to yield 700,000 barrels of oil that real excitement and money started to flow in North Dakota. Marathon Oil is investing $1.5 billion and drilling 300 new wells in what is expected to be one of the greatest booms in Oil discovery since Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.
The US imported about 14 million barrels of Oil per day in 2007 , which means US consumers sent about $340 Billion Dollars over seas building palaces in Dubai and propping up unfriendly regimes around the World, if 200 billion barrels of oil at $90 a barrel are recovered in the high plains the added wealth to the US economy would be $18 Trillion Dollars which would go a long way in stabilizing the US trade deficit and could cut the cost of oil in half in the long run.
Link
^
This is old, old news.
Everyone in the oil exploitation game has known about the Bakken for decades.
I drilled a multilateral Bakken well in North Dakota 18 years ago.
The bottom line is always the same: as the price of oil increases and improved production technology is introduced these old bypassed and overlooked reserviours
become potentially viable once again.
Thats all it is.
If oil hits $200/BBL you will hear about even more "New and Huge" discoverys.
Its all the expensive stuff and crumbs left behind that are becoming viable as the price increases.
Karrie has it pretty much spot on with her assesment of whats going on in the Bakken .
The formations are tight,low porosity with terrible effective permiability.
You need fairly long laterals or multilateral horizontal wells to start.
The improved packer hookups for doing stage frac's are really helping just like Karrie says.
I remember dropping balls down the pipe trying to plug the perfs and get a selective frac in the old days, things change and improve.
Having said all that multilaterals followed by complex completion and stimulation programs are expensive as hell.
But at $125 +/bbl it's looking good now.
The Bakken extends well under Sask so there is lots of acerage to drill on our side of the line.
The oil companies are busy picking it all over trying to find the " sweet spots".
Actually it's the "best of the worst" as it's a huge but crappy reseviour.
Trex
Les
Posts: 6,139
Location: 50 acres in Kootenays BC
Location: 50 acres in Kootenays BC
August 3rd, 2008, 11:13 AM
lol So it costs a fortune to extract enough for half a fortune. That happened at the Tar Sands. Hopefully, by the time they they can figure out how to extract it cheaply enough to make it feasible, we'll have started using other sources of energy in a big way and make the extraction redundant.
lol So it costs a fortune to extract enough for half a fortune. That happened at the Tar Sands. Hopefully, by the time they they can figure out how to extract it cheaply enough to make it feasible, we'll have started using other sources of energy in a big way and make the extraction redundant.
