The Bakken Book: Mile 50 If This Were The Daytona 500 -- We Haven't Even Reached The First Pit Stop -- NDIC

The Bismarck Tribune is reporting:

North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources director Lynn Helms told the interim Government Finance Committee to expect around 2,000 wells to be drilled next year.

Preliminary September oil numbers, the most recent available, put daily production in North Dakota at more than 931,000 barrels from nearly 9,700 producing wells.

Helms used the Daytona 500 car race as an analogy when trying to quantify the frenetic pace of drilling and where the industry is in developing the state’s oil patch.

“We’re at about Mile 50,” Helms said. “We’re very early in the race. We’re not even to the first pit stop yet.”

Helms said lawmakers need to be aware of the price of crude oil, which has dropped from more than $90 per barrel in August and September to the low $70s currently.

What was not reported: everyone agrees that it will take 60,000 wells to drill out the Bakken. This was before the lower benches of the Three Forks became a hot topic. A few argue that it will take much more than 60,000 wells.

But for argument's sake. 60,000 wells. 2,000 wells/year. I'm not good at math, but I think that's 30 years of drilling. The North Dakota Bakken boom is in its seventh year but the operators have been drilling 2,000 wells/year only the last couple of years, and then, just barely.

The Daytona 500 analogy was interesting. 

A big "thank you" to Don for sending me this story and the story at the previous post.

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A Note to the Granddaughters

From Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe:

Experiment 1: turn your head from left to right a few times.
Experiment 2: move your eyes from left to right a few times, without moving your head.

Did you notice how the first time, the external reality appears to rotate, and the second time, it appeared to stay still, even though your eyeballs rotated both times? This proves that what your mind's eye is looking at isn't the external reality, but a reality model stored in your brain!

If you looked at the image recorded by a rotating video camera, you'd clearly see it move as it did in Experiment 1.

But your eyes are a form of biological video camera, so Experiment 2 shows that your consciousness isn't directly perceiving the images formed on their retinas. Rather, as neuro-scientists have now studied in great detail, the information recorded by your retinas gets processed in highly complex ways and is used to continually update an elaborate model of the outside world that's stored in your brain.

Take another look in front of you, and you'll see that, thanks to this advanced information processing, your reality model is three-dimensional even though the raw images from your retinas are two-dimensional.

Fascinating.