Great Story on the Bakken -- North Dakota, USA

A reader alerted me to this story: something to read while waiting for the daily news cycle to begin.

Perhaps more comments later; I have to get going. Nothing one didn't know, but still "fun" to read.

First paragraph from the story:

Quick—which state produces more oil: Alaska or California? That’s easy. Alaska, du-uh. And that’s wrong. California passed Alaska in daily oil production in June last year (561,000 bbls per day for CA; 533,000 bbls per day for AK).

This isn’t because California has opened new fields or increased production from old ones. Far from it. California’s oil production continues its slow, long-term slide, down 49.1 percent from its peak production level of 1.1 million barrels per day in February 1986. But Alaska’s production has declined even more, down 74.2 percent from its peak of 2 million barrels a day in 1988 (when Alaska only briefly exceeded Texas as our leading oil-producing state).

And later:

But the biggest story in domestic oil production is . . . North Dakota. New fields in North Dakota, also mostly on private land, have seen its oil production increase 138 percent since January 2008 to 329,000 barrels a day. North Dakota has blown by Oklahoma and Louisiana to become America’s fourth-largest oil-producing state.

And for investors in energy, another story nice to read. This one, a Financial Times, reporting what we already know: shares in energy companies have had a huge run the past six months.