Re-Fracking In The Bakken; Global Warming Hitting Boston -- February 10, 2015

Emerald Oil's play in western McKenzie County, the Charbonneau oil field, has been updated.

Manitou field has been updated; predominantly Hess; talk about a field that is ripe for re-fracking -- see next link.

A reader send me a link to this article on re-fracking. FuelFix is reporting: 

Try your hand at this oil field engineering problem.
You have to get a massive amount of gritty, grimy sand into an oil well – it’s one of the ingredients in the powerful slurry of water and chemicals used to crack open shale rocks two miles underground, a process known as hydraulic fracturing. Can you do it without letting the sand erode the steel in the high-horsepower pumps that blast the mixture into the well?

Give up? The question had bugged Ron Gusek for a decade.

In the Bakken Shale, it takes $6 million a year in maintenance and repair costs to keep a frac fleet of trucks and pumps up and running, leaving North Dakotan oil field workers no choice but to replace broken valves and other pump components every four days.

Gusek says his company, Liberty Oilfield Services, is a month or two away from bringing a new technology to market that could fix that problem. It is planning to deploy a trailer carrying a heavy tungsten carbide-built pumping system that will allow sand to bypass the high-horsepower charge pumps and only mix with water and chemicals in an outside blender before shooting through tungsten carbide tubes — many times stronger than steel — and into the well.

That may cut down on oil field maintenance costs at a time when U.S. shale oil producers are scraping for every penny after crude’s seven-month plunge to around $50 a barrel. At a booth in the Society of Petroleum Engineer’s seventh annual Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference in the Woodlands on Wednesday, Gusek said the new pumping system won’t be the only new, more efficient technology oil companies need, but it’s another tool that could save them time and money.

Re-fracking -- one of the buzzwords around the oil patch these days.

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Kennedy Cold Front To Hit Boston Later This Week

Here's where it stands in Boston today, looking toward the rest of the week, and then to the end of the month. Boston CBS Local is reporting there are two scenarios this week:

#1) We catch just the beginning stages of this rapid development and get “fringed” by some light, but likely plowable snow in Eastern Massachusetts. This is currently the more likely scenario, however we cannot rule out. . .

#2) The whole system isn’t quite as progressive and it literally explodes in the perfect spot (the sweet spot, 40/70) for New England storms. We feel the full rage of this nor’easter, get blizzard conditions Thursday night into Friday, strong and damaging winds and a boatload of new snow.

Clearly the second option would cause MAJOR problems. With no place to put the snow and wind gusts which could exceed 50-60 mph I cannot even imagine the mess we would have on our hands. The next 24 hours of model runs will be critical in determining the final track, timing and ultimately the significance of this event in southern New England.

And it won't end:

We are nearing the breaking point and a storm like this one could potentially hurdle us right over the edge. Please don’t take this as “hype”, this is a very serious situation. Of course, our team will keep you updated as the forecast becomes more clear.

One thing is certain, this pattern is going nowhere. The snow and cold are here to stay in New England, likely for at least the remainder of February. There is no thaw, no pattern change, no immediate relief in sight. Storm or no storm, later this week some of the coldest air thus far will pour down from Northern Canada. If it isn’t snow records, we will likely challenge some low temperature records over the weekend.

It seems time and money would have been better spent preparing for these incredible winters than preparing for predictions that the ocean will rise 0.01 inch/decade over the next century, and the earth's temperature will increase by two degrees at worse.

My hunch is that earth's temperature will  have to increase by 2 degrees just to get us back to normal. Assuming the warmists don't "manipulate" the thermometers.

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JetBlue To Accept Apple Pay

Macrumors is reporting that JetBlue will be first airline to accept Apple Pay:

Passengers on select JetBlue Airways flights will be able to use Apple Pay to purchase things in-flight starting next week, according to USA Today. It will become the first airline to accept Apple Pay in-flight. 

JetBlue is my wife's favorite airline. Unfortunately it does not have a direct flight from Dallas-Ft Worth area to southern California. There is a direct flight from LAX to DFW, but to get back to LAX, one must take a connecting flight through Boston.

Yes, Boston. Dallas (DFW) to Logan International Airport - Boston to LAX.