The article begins:
Two items crossed our desk last week that drove us to look closer at what is happening in the North Dakota oil shale boom. One was a set of Bakken and Three Forks shale formation production data in the state and the other was the announcement of plans to spend $800 million to improve infrastructure and overcome social issues.It continues:
The Bakken oil shale boom ranks as one of the most impressive successes in the history of the American oil and gas business. The shale formation lies within the broadly defined Williston Basin, a long-standing oil and gas producing region that covers parts of North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana, and extends across the border into Canada’s Saskatchewan and Manitoba provinces. The Bakken production is largely concentrated in North Dakota and Montana as well as Saskatchewan. Bakken output growth has grown to over one million barrels of oil per day now from less than two thousand barrels per day in December 2004, when North Dakota was a minor oil producing state ranking only ninth in output. The state now ranks as the number two oil-producing state behind Texas.
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Hope Springs Eternal
Logic dictates that the United States will one day approve the northern leg of TransCanada Corp's controversial Keystone XL crude oil pipeline, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper told an audience of executives in New York on Wednesday.
"I'm not going to speculate on timelines other than to say the obvious benefits and merits of the project.... mean that the logic is it will be approved at some point in the future," he said. "I think its eventual approval under the right circumstances is inevitable."
Harper also said that while increased U.S. oil production has changed the economics of the industry, the need for the pipeline has not vanished.
Small chuckle. One never knows, but it is interesting, isn't it how things work out.
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