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Monday, September 5, 2011

NBC Nightly News -- September 4, 2011 -- Boom Town -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA

This was the video segment on NBC's evening news, Sunday night, September 4, 2011: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/44393017#44393017

I have no idea how long this video will stay linked.

5 comments:

  1. The truck traffic part was interesting but these mainstream media stories are covering well plowed ground. This is not a bad thing. I have dealt with news stories that have made the jump to mainstream media. It legitimizes the story and the mainstream media covers it often with footage from the same "backpack journalist.

    Nothing wrong with that. That said, what I see in this story is a damage control in the theme that "The Bakken is great but it is one of a kind". This is good for the Bakken but the horizontal drilling/fracking process is being used in a lot of places and that is before we even get to oil sands. I am see a lot of commercials on oil sands.

    Canada only draws USA blood on the hockey rink. Everyone likes Canada!

    The CNBC.com's magnificent Cramer/Mad Money special on the Bakken was a watershed event in US public awareness of the Bakken. It's difficult to judge from here in Minneapolis because everyone has heard about the Bakken here. I just need to give them a primer. When I talk to reporters and people from other parts of the USA they have heard of the Bakken, Williston and North Dakota. I can easily spend a half our with a reporter just on the basics heavy with suggestions with how they can use Al Gore's alleged invention, the internet to learn more.


    Suffice it to say there is a big learning curve on the Bakken in the "Fourth Estate". Fortunately they get young interns and energetic "backpack journalists" to do research, mostly on Al Gore's alleged invention.

    Watch for a lot more mainstream media coverage of the Bakken.

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  2. Here in Williston a lot of folks a) don't understand the Bakken; b) don't understand horizontal/fracturing; and, c) remain skeptical that the Bakken is going to last more than a few years.

    When you drive through the old residential sections of the city, there is no evidence of any change. The changes in Williston are on the outskirts and in the new subdivisions.

    One reads a lot about the heavy traffic, but it's nothing compared to the big cities, but yes, it's more dangerous because so much of it is heavy trucks and neither truck drivers nor car drivers quite understand the dangers/limitations of each.

    Someone said their telephone lines inquiring about jobs after the Cramer story were jammed with overwhelming number of phone calls.

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  3. By the way, I think God loves to play with Tonka trucks, and right now the Bakken is his/her sandbox.

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  4. After enduring past boom-bust cycles it's understandable that the locals are "gun shy". The two keys to the Bakken "having legs" are high energy prices and government/environmental regulation. We all want a clean environmental but the "snail darter" school of enviormental regulation aims to use these regulations to obstruct or extort.

    People have trouble with the concept of horizontal drilling. I'll admit it is still a bit "magic" to me even after a year. I've found a good visual aid to help people comprehend the turn from vertical to horizontal. It is the freeway "cloverleaf" outer 90 degree turns. Let's say you are going to the right, you are traveling north and you want to go east that wide 90 degree turn on the cloverleaf looks about like the 600 foot+ radius curve used for horizontal drilling.

    If I was doing a graphic on horizontal drilling I would have a freeway cloverleaf drawing for scale. People seem more atease with the horizontal drilling concept when they scale it to a turn to the right on a freeway cloverleaf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloverleaf_interchange

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  5. You are correct. There are many levels of understanding, misunderstanding, lack of understanding, refusing to understand, etc.

    With regards to the horizontal drilling in North Dakota, what I think most folks fail to realize is how big this is going to be. We truly cannot comprehend it; we cannot imagine what it's going to look like 10 years from now.

    You can still drive many miles and not see a well or a rig, and folks talk about one well per section; they think one well per section will be a lot of wells. In fact, the "poorer" Bakken will have two to four wells per spacing unit, and the "great" Bakken locations will have seven to eight wells per spacing unit. That's a lot of wells.

    Already, in the September NDIC dockets, operators are requesting permission to put seven wells in a spacing unit -- to include spacing units of 640 acres.

    I just posted a story about Linde's plans for three CRYO facilities and when I mentioned this to another person here in Williston, it was "well, just one more thing."

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