SM Energy Company To Exit The Bakken -- Foreshadowing Back In January, 2017 -- April 5, 2018

From my notes over at the "Bakken Operator page":

SM (previously St Mary Land and Exploration)

• Daily activity report: 156 SM Energy wells transferred to Oasis, March 8, 2017
• Is SM Energy exiting the Bakken completely? It appears so. January 25, 2017.
• Oasis - SM Energy deal, October, 2016: SM Energy sells 55,000 non-Divide County acres to Oasis; $785 million deal 
• 3Q14: 238,000 net acres in the Williston Basin; new acreage in Gooseneck prospect in central Divide
• 202,000 + 7,0000 acres = 209,000 acres; sells non-core assets; now down to about 159,000 net acres in the Bakken
• Filloon says SM has 202,000 net acres (4Q11)
• 2 rigs; a third sometime late 2011 
• 4Q11: 8,200 boepd
• 3Q11: 5,300 boepd
• Was a natural gas company; moving to oil; still (4Q11) 56% natural gas

Now, today over at Zacks:

SM Energy Company has inked two definitive agreements for the sale of assets in the Williston Basin and Upton County. The company did not reveal the buyers. A cumulative amount of $292.3 million is expected from the transactions.

The first agreement relates to the sale of remaining assets in the Williston Basin located in Divide County, ND. This comprises net acreage of about 119,400 acres, which are primarily contiguous. It also includes net proved reserves as of year-end 2017 of 28.8 million barrels of oil equivalent, of which 52% are proved undeveloped. In December 2017, net production from the assets to be sold was about 6,100 boe per day, of which 83% was oil.

The second relates to the sale of its third-party operated assets known as Halff East located in Upton County, TX. The assets likely to be sold in Upton County comprises a 60% working interest in third-party operated assets, a net acreage of about 5,400 and 1.6 MMBoe net proved reserves as of year-end 2017, of which 0% is proved undeveloped. In December, net production from these assets was about 1,025 Boe per day, of which 72% oil.

Unfortunately the two deals were combined with regard to total amount received ($292.3 million). But the Upton County was only 5,400 acres vs almost 120,000 acres in North Dakota. So, let's just go with $292 million / 119,400 acres = $2,500 / acre.

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The Language Page

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud, Peter Watson, c. 2005.

I've always wondered how the Chinese language handled verbs and nouns. I've asked many people who I thought should know and never got a satisfactory answer.

But now, here it is, from the book noted above, page 301:

Because Chinese is a non-inflectional language, words do not change according to number, gender, case, tense, voice or mood. Relationships are indicated either by word order or the use of auxiliary words.

Take for example this sentence as it would be delivered in Chinese: "Yesterday he give I two literature revolution book."

"Yesterday" indicates that "give" means "gave" (as would say in English).

Word order indicates that "I" means me, and "two" indicates that "book" means "books."

The most difficult interpretation in this sentence is "literature revolution." But the word order indicates that it must mean "literary revolution" and not "revolutionary literature." And so the full sentence means, "Yesterday, he gave me two books on [the] literary revolution"

Auxiliary words like le indicate a completed tense of a verb and "I" followed by wen means "we."

Words are classified as "solid" or "empty." Solid words have meaning in themselves, while empty ones are used in a grammatical sense, to fulfil (sic)prepositional, connective or interrogative functions. "You are an Englishman, ma," for example, means "Are you an Englishman?"

[You are an Englishman, yes?]

In the same way that the Chinese language is based on a different set of ideas from the Indo-European languages, so its script is very different from the Western alphabets. It recalls much more the early pictographs used in Mesopotamia at the birth of writing. All Chinese dialects use the same script, on which others such as Korean and Japanese are based. According to tradition, Chinese script was invented by Cang Re, an official at the court of the semi-mythical emperor, Huang Di, who lived at the beginning of the third millenium BC, though there is no archaeological evidence for the Chinese script older than 1400 BC on oracle bones and bronze vessels.

The script is based on four ideas.

The first is pictorial representation. The sun, for instance, was first written as a circle with a dot inside. This was later schematised (sic) as a rectangle with a short stroke in the middle. Three peaks stood for a mountain.

The second principle was the use of diagrams. Numbers, for example, were simple strokes and the concepts "above" and "below" were represented by a dot above and below a horizontal stroke.

The third principle was suggestion (and a certain sense of humor). "Hear," for example, was shown by an ear between two panels of a door, and "forest" was two trees side-by-side.

The fourth principle is to combine signification and phonetics. For example, the character for "ocean" and "sheep" are both yang, with the same tone. So ocean became yang plus the character for "water." This is only a beginning, of course. Chinese characters are classified in dictionaries according to 214 "radicals," or identifying roots. These indicate the general characteristics of meaning, on which various embellishments have been added.

Chinese script, traditionally written with a brush, rather than a pen, exists in various styles -- such as regular style, the running style, and the "grass" style.

In the regular style, each stroke is separate, comparable to manuscript writing in English or Latin.

In the running style, separate strokes tend to merge into flowing lines, much more so than cursive script in English. The grass style is much abbreviated, like shorthand. For example, the character li (ritual, propriety) is written with seventeen strokes in regular style, nine in running style, and just four in grass style. The regular style is used in formal writing but running style is preferred in art, which includes calligraphy.