Oil, Wheat, Honey, ... Diamonds? Oh, This Is Going To Be Great -- January 21, 2016

Updates

January 30, 2016: Inforum.com headline --

Officials raise ‘deep concern’ that proposed drilling project near Rugby could lead to nuclear waste disposal in N.D. 

I thought that was the purpose all along. By pointing this out early, the governor will not be nominated for the Geico Rock Award based on this story.
 

Original Post

 

I've been busy with the granddaughters the past few days which means I'm way behind in my blogging. I've seen a lot of headlines, folks have sent me a lot of stories, but I just haven't had time to post them. Sorry.

I saw the headline for this story some days ago and my first thought was "no nuclear waste in North Dakota." When it comes to nuclear waste, NIMBY, or what used to be my backyard.

But reading this story puts a different perspective on the whole thing. A big "thank you" to a second reader for sending me this. The Bismarck Tribune is reporting that the state is looking at drilling a really, really deep hole near Rugby, North Dakota.

Maybe it's not going to be the deepest hole ever, but .... see for yourself:

Scientists want to go to the middle of the continent near Rugby to peer deep where few have looked before.

The Energy and Environmental Research Center in Grand Forks will approach the state to drill down more than 16,000 feet into the oldest rock on the planet to conduct a rare geological science experiment.

The State Land Board will hear plans to use 20 acres of state-owned land near Balta in Pierce County for a Department of Energy project to test whether crystalline rock is suitable for storing spent nuclear waste capsules.

The article continues:

The EERC would have the drilling contract and the opportunity to study rock that’s 4 million and 6 million years old, the building block of the continent, says John Harju, associate research director.

“This is a big-time science project. There might be a handful of penetrations into deep crystalline rock, but none to this kind of depth — very rarely has a bore hole been attempted at these depths,” Harju said.

The core samples from the boring would be a valuable addition to the state’s core library and studied by geologists for decades to come, according to Harju.

“There could be diamonds. We don’t know what these rocks look like. The sheer exploration opportunity this affords is astounding,” Harju said.

Already #1 or #2  or #3 in oil, wheat, honey, what a hoot to think we might find diamonds. If they are industrial grade diamonds, I know about fifteen oil operators that would love to have them for their rigs. If they're even better than that, I know a jewelry store in Williston that might be interested.

As far as storing nuclear capsules in this rock? We can cross that bridge when we get to it.

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Deep Holes And Old Posts

Whether that will be the deepest hole drilled in North Dakota or not, I don't know, but I do have a link at the very bottom of the sidebar, "Deepest Well Drilled In North Dakota." That was posted back on June 28, 2011.

Be very, very careful. There is a difference between total depth (TD) and TVD (true vertical depth) when talking about oil wells. Total depth for a horizontal well is the total distance the roughnecks drill -- if it's a horizontal well that goes down 10,000 feet vertically and then horizontally 10,000 feet, the TD (total depth) is 20,000 feet. The true vertical depth is only 10,000 feet.

The post at the link above was written a long, long time ago. There may be more errors in it than usual; I was just starting to learn about the Bakken and did not understand much of what was going on. In addition, a lot of the links are now broken.

By the way, if you went to the sidebar at the right, and scrolled all the way to the bottom to find the "deepest well drilled in North Dakota" you might have also stumbled on another post, "North Dakota is home to first US mosque."

It's hard to believe that link still works. That voanews story was last updated October 30, 2009:

Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States, and there are more than 1,200 mosques around the country, with at least one in every state. The vast majority are in major metropolitan areas, especially in New York and California, but America's first mosque was built in one of the least populous states - North Dakota.

Like many immigrants, the Lebanese who arrived on the flat plains of North Dakota in the early years of the 20th century came in search of economic opportunity. Hassan Abdallah says his parents didn't plan to stay.

"They always talked about how they came to the United States. They were going to get rich and go back to Lebanon. It didn't work out that way. Nobody got rich."

The Abdallahs weren't the only ones who came here from Lebanon hoping to make their fortune and go back home. "There was a bunch of them (who) came," Mr. Abdallah says, "not at once, but they kept coming, helped each other out. There were quite a few here years ago."

And sometime around 1929 or 1930, when they realized they would be staying in North Dakota, working as farmers and raising their families here, the Lebanese community decided to build a mosque: Ross, North Dakota.

According to documentary filmmaker Joan Mandell, the second mosque in the United States was built five years after the one in Ross, North Dakota, by immigrants to Rapid City, Iowa (sic; no doubt they meant, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a huge Lebanese magnet). The simple, white-framed building with a green dome is still standing in the middle of a residential community.

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Learning To Play Yahtzee

It was too cold (global warming? LOL) to go to the park this afternoon so we stayed indoors and played games. Here is 18-month-old Sophia learning to play Yahtzee:

 The Roll

And the score.

The oldest granddaughter is preparing to play the bass flute as part of an upcoming ensemble competition. To reach the really, really low notes, she needed a little help from Sophia to push the buttons at the very bottom of the flute: