Beautiful, Balmy, Boston Day -- The Bakken, North Dakota, USA

That's not a typo up there. After about three months in the Bakken, I'm back in Boston with my granddaughters.

My blogging about the Bakken will continue, but it won't be throughout the day. I will probably be blogging early in the morning, later in the evening.

I turned on television this a.m. and to get to CNBC had to surf through a dozen other channels. I stopped for less than three minutes on MSNBC, my least favorite station and one I refuse to watch. The host -- blocking on his name now -- actually said this: "Folks thought Obama would come to this town (Washington, DC) and change things. But Obama was NOT UP TO THE TASK."

Wow, first it was CM on Screwball who turned on Obama, now it's the MSNBC morning host -- oh, yes, that's right Sourbreath. I always said that these folks would turn on Obama; I just did not know when. I'm sure CM at Screwball is looking at his ratings and realizes he needs to switch horses.

Sourbreath, of course, is a lot like me: we were hoping that that Obama could do big things. Well, he did BIG things. Is the US $17 trillion in debt. Except for the debacle called ObamaCare I can't think of one thing his administration has accomplished.

If I still comments, folks would tell me he has accomplished quite a bit: he shut down the Gulf for two years (and counting); he shut down the Keystone XL; he fast-tracked golden eagle and whooping crane killers; he changed the name of General Motors to Government Motors. He came close to shutting down thousands of Boeing jobs in South Carolina, but cooler heads prevailed (my hunch is the White House called the NLRB and told the board to back off; the president doesn't need yet another job-killing headline).

But enough of that; you get the point

**********************

The fracking backlog is not getting better in North Dakota. There were glimmers of hope earlier this week when several wells were fracked "on time," but that appears to have been an anomaly. Yesterday three wells came off the confidential list -- more about that in a moment -- and not one of them was completed/fracked. If I recall, earlier this week, even wells coming off DRL status are not reporting an IP -- that I do not understand.

**********************

That "confidential list." The NDIC still posts a confidential list, but on the daily activity report, the NDIC no longer refers to the "confidential list." The NDIC reports wells being "released from 'tight hole' status." I don't know when, how,  or why that change occurred. I noted some months ago that wells once having come off the confidential list could be placed back on "confidential" status. And, of course, before wells were spud, they were allowed to be placed on "tight status," another term for confidential status. My hunch is that NDIC just decided to start referring to everything as "tight" as opposed to "confidential," except for the confidential list.

Permit issuing by the NDIC is not slowing down. Rule of thumb: average of four new permits each day during the past year (4 x 365 = 1,500 permits for the year). On Monday, there was usually a few more, which made sense, but this week, on two days, middle of the week, there were double-digit number of permits issued. On Wednesday, fifteen, and then yesterday, twelve permits.

A lot of this is somewhat "artificial," or simply a change in the way of doing business. The change: multiple well pads. In the "old" days -- one year ago -- it was only the bigger players that put multiple wells on one pad, notably CLR. But now we are seeing "everyone" putting multiple wells on one pad. Most are 2-well pads, some are three. CLR "invented" the EcoPad, a 4-well pad, and now has permits for a 6-well pad (earlier this week). Yesterday, Abraxas was issued permits for a 2-well pad; if this is not their first such multiple well pad, it's one of their earlier ones. Petro-Hunt has a 3-well pad.

I'll post those permits later; they were released yesterday when I was somewhere over fly-over country, perhaps Kansas. There's a reason I specifically mentioned Kansas. If you go to the link, and I wouldn't -- it has nothing to do with the Bakken -- but if you do go to the link, scroll down and read a bit about William Least Heat-Moon's Prairie Erth, a study of a single county in Kansas. The more I read, the better it gets; maybe some snippets later on.

So, now to explore the Bakken over the net.

Good luck to all.

Oh, despite being away from the Bakken, I'm not losing my edge. Earlier this week I asked "where was Corzine"; I hadn't/haven't seen him for weeks. He is AWOL after his start-up "madoff" with several billion dollars. He used to be on the morning talk shows, CNBC and MSNBC, or was it just MSNBC? almost every week. Yesterday, the Drudge Report has a link asking the same questions: where's Corzine. Wow, someone is reading my blog. Ya gotta love it.