Wednesday, December 28, 2011

No Words Left to Describe the Bakken -- Rigzone -- The Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Link here.  From the Bismarck Tribune as posted in Rigzone.

This article is mostly about the Montana towns and cities along the North Dakota/Montana state line: Billings, Sidney, Fairview, Bainville.

Data points:
  • Jobless rate in Sidney: 2.8 percent; other parts of Montana -- 14 percent
  • Fairview: railroad loading facility for oil; 100-car tanker trains
  • Billings: more than 50 businesses chasing $1.5 billion/month being spent on oil wells in the Bakken
  • More than 200 rigs in the Bakken; each well averages $7 million to drill
  • Montana side of the Bakken: $1.2 billion/year
  • Billings' Whitewood Transport, Inc (local trucking company): business has jumped 8-fold in two years
  • Sanjel: opened new office in Billings
  • Aspen Air US Corps of Billings, hauls liquefied nitrogen; sales have tripled
  • RDO Equipment, sells heavy equipment; sales up one-third in two years
  • Billings: not just the Bakken, but natural gas and coal
  • First unit-train hauling crude to Louisiana left Dickinson, ND, on November 9, 2011
  • Within 35-mile radius of Bainville, two companies are investing $500 million to $1 billion to build two oil loading facilities and a natural gas loading plant
  • Businesses have to provide housing for their own employees
  • 350 oil companies working in Williston
  • "More trucks rolling Williston, ND, now than in downtown Chicago."

2 comments:

  1. I hear the wells in Montana particulariliy Roosevelt County are in a shallower bed of rock meaning the well won't produce as much or last as long as a Norht Dakota Bakken well? Is this true?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I haven't followed the Montana oil and gas industry, so I don't have any insight on longevity of their wells.

    However, my hunch is that it is much more complicated than that. I have a very good link to "factors that affect a successful Bakken well" on the sidebar at the right, and depth is not one of the factors.

    The major factors are thickness of the formation, TOC, maturity, porosity and permeability.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.