Here We Go -- Another Energy Merger -- The Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Plains All American Pipeline to buy SemGroup Corporation.

And, yes, Plains All American is in North Dakota. I did not know this: Don tells me -- PAA has a CBR oil loading facility at Ross, ND.

Don sent me this link: recent PAA presentation. Pay particular attention to slide 41 (goes along with a Carpe Diem.com story earlier this a.m), and with slides 60 - 62, specifically about the Bakken. Also, slide 74, 75, 78. When I look at this presentation, and others, and then reflect on what I'm seeing here in Williston, particularly all the industrial parks still in infancy, and outside Williston, particularly the number of CBR oil loading facilities, I am really getting the impression the oil companies said as much as they could to get the investors to invest in the Bakken, but were careful not to say how huge this play really is. Perhaps Harold Hamm is the only one who has nailed it: 24 billion bbls from the Bakken/TF. It just seems that if the potential is only what the USGS says it is, we have all the oil service companies and infrastructure in place that we need. But yet, the growth continues, much more than one would expect. At least to a layperson's eyes. When you look at the PAA presentation, remember that natural gas (PAA's focus) represents only four percent of the economic activity in the Bakken.

This blog posted a story on PAA back in November, 2010: the Bakken North Project -- a pipeline from Trenton, ND, to Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Plains All American announced plans to acquire Bakken Gathering and Transportation for $210 million earlier this year.

Plains All American Pipeline, LP, is a publicly traded master limited partnership -- I've always considered PAA with a heavier role in natural gas transportation, rather than crude oil, but they do both. I believe SemGroup is predominantly a transporter of natural gas in the United States, though it does have crude oil storage facilities in the UK.

Put this story and the stories about the ONEOK CRYO plants west of Williston together, and we're talking some serious natural gas investment in the Bakken -- and the Bakken is an "oil" field, not a natural gas field. The natural gas coming out of the Bakken accounts for four (4) percent of the economic value of production coming from the Bakken. Four percent.