Snapshot Of SI/NC (DUCs) In The Bakken -- December 23, 2015

The number of wells currently on the SI/NC (DUC) list:

• current quarter, 4Q15:  120
• 3Q15: 110
• 2Q15: 82
• 1Q15: 32
• 4Q14: 7

At any given moment the number could change, but these were the number of wells on SI/NC status as of the date of the original post. I do not remember when I last updated these pages, so the numbers could be significantly different by now. I will update the numbers periodically.

For newbies: until November, 2014, operators had one year to complete a well once it had been spud (and there were quibbles about when the clock actually started ticking, but that's another story for another time). With the glut of oil and the slump in oil prices, the NDIC gave operators an additional year to complete their wells in North Dakota. I'll talk more about this later. Currently, the NDIC estimates there are about 975 wells on the SI/NC (DUC) list.

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Freudenshade

BloombergBusiness is reporting:

At Chipotle, three different pathogens caused the five known outbreaks. That wasn’t inevitable or coincidental. “There’s a problem within the company,” says Michael Doyle, the director of the center for food safety at the University of Georgia.

Chipotle has gotten big selling food that’s unprocessed, free of antibiotics and GMOs, sometimes organic, sometimes local.

“Blah, blah, blah,” says Doug Powell, a retired food-safety professor and the publisher of barfblog.com. “They were paying attention to all that stuff, but they weren’t paying attention to microbial safety.” Whatever its provenance, if food is contaminated it can still make us sick—or even kill. Millennials may discriminate when they eat, but bacteria are agnostic.

By the way, have you ever wondered why "organic'" vegetables and fruits look as good as or even better than insecticide-treated conventional vegetables and fruits? Certainly, insecticide-free vegetables and fruits are being attacked by insects; and certainly without any insecticides, the vegetables and fruits would have evidence of insect damage. Certainly, organic farmers are not picking one or two perfect pieces of produce out of a hundred.

This is the story. To be declared "organic," the government requires that no insecticide be sprayed directly on the plants. Large corporate farms are spraying heavy amounts of insecticide on every other row of plants. Much of that excess insecticide will blow over to the neighboring rows of "organic" plants.

At least that's what I'm told. Could be wrong. But it would explain a lot. There's no way "organic" fruits and vegetables look that good without insecticides.

Back to Chipotle and microbes: Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli 026 was one of the culprits and apparently there were five strains (so far).

Shiga toxin is no laughing matter. Very, very scary.

Shiga? Shigella.