This Has To Be One Of The Longest Stretches With WTI > $100 In Quite Some Time; We Will Miss The Oil Drum

It is amazing what happens when the industry alleviates the choke point at Cushing.

I believe July 31, 2013, was supposed to be the last day for The Oil Drum, the peak oil web site but there were a heck of a lot of articles posted at that site today, including:

• British gas profits during winter chill
• Canada's economy expands in May as retail offsets oil
• Bakken shale will keep OPEC on its toes
• Small firms, not big guns drive Bakken shale
• Iraq headed for first annual drop in oil output in three years (this is huge, folks)
• "Why the peak oilers are still right"
• Three (3) reasons peak oil might not be such a big deal -- LOL
• Lawyer who sued Chevron in Ecuador is now being sued by Chevron
• England looking more and more that it will frack
• Radioactive Japanese sea -- this will never end

By the way, I missed this one from The Oil Drum from two days ago, an update of the "Red Queen." Lots of graphs. My hunch is two people will read the entire essay. One person might understand it. I think this question and the author's reply was priceless.  

The question:

Do you have any numbers on how many wells have already been plugged and abandoned in the Bakken Play since 2008?

The answer:

As of now I do not have data on any number of wells plugged and abandoned in Bakken since 2008.

Of the wells I studied with full time series that started as from January 2010, I found no well getting plugged and abandoned as of May 2013.

The fact is, almost NO Bakken wells have been plugged and abandoned. Some weeks ago I looked at the first several hundred Bakken wells looking for plugged and abandoned wells and quit that exercise because it became pointless. 

For all his data and all his analysis, I find it incredible, this analyst did not even have such basic information as that -- how many Bakken wells that have been plugged and abandoned. And if he ever posts that data, he has to separate out those that were never drilled to planned total depth, such as the Oasis well reported this month that was drilled to 3,000; developed problems, and they simply cut their losses, plugged and abandoned it, and moved on. But it will be called a plugged and abandoned Bakken well, when in fact, it wasn't. It wasn't even a well. It was a shallow hole.