Comments From the Trenches: Mud and Fracking -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA

I was sent the following information from someone visiting the North Dakota oil patch recently. He is in Stanley for a few days.

He says that last year in the Stanley area, drilling rigs were everywhere but this year, it appears there are fewer in that immediate area.

He also noticed that an "inventory" of fracking equipment was sitting right off the side of the highway around Ray, North Dakota (this would be the Hess, Tracker, American Oil area, I suppose), waiting to be moved.

Apparently some fracking trailers and "older" oil equipment was still on some pads, unable to be moved, because of muddy conditions that still existed despite less rain the past few weeks.

His hunch is that the "fracking backlog" is aggravated by mud still remaining in so many areas, in addition to so many wells that need to be fracked. He saw the same thing I did when I was in North Dakota a few weeks ago: North Dakota now has many, many more ponds than we were both used to seeing. If Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes, North Dakota is the land of 10,000 ponds.

By the way, adding to the problem is that the fracking teams do have a schedule, and when the schedule is disrupted, it no doubt adds to the delay downstream.

Idle chatter, but I thought some folks might enjoy hearing something from the trenches.