Whiting has a permit for another Pronghorn Sands prospect well:
- 21958, LOC, Whiting, Iver & Minnie 21-14PH, Zenith, Pronghorn Sands
Despite all the financial and economic gloom, 2011 has been a record year for oil with Brent crude at its highest-ever average above $110 per barrel, and few analysts forecast a big drop in price, even those who expect an economic slowdown.
Rising demand for fuel from China and other emerging economies, declining output from traditional suppliers including the North Sea and interruptions to production in key exporters such as Libya have kept the oil market tight.
And unless the United States, the world's biggest oil consumer, slips into a double-dip recession, oil prices are likely to stay strong, at least until the end of the northern-hemisphere winter.
"World oil demand is growing and, if supplies don't increase, either inventories have to fall or prices rise: both have been happening."
This is even more likely given the rising cost of production for OPEC members in the Middle East Gulf, which analysts at Deutsche Bank now estimate as high as $86.50 per barrel.Also, in the article:
Goldman Sachs, the most accurate oil price forecaster over the last year, now sees Brent at $125 per barrel in 12 months.I've seen that same number elsewhere, and if the Bakken oil is tanked/piped to Louisiana it can be sold at Louisiana sweet oil prices, which compare favorably with Brent.
As shown in Exhibit 5, the 2011-2012 winter forecast shows that temperatures should average between 1°C and 1.4°C below normal. The forecast for November called for a 1.4°C lower temperature range, which would seem to be consistent with the cooling that has been experienced since late October. The chart shows a multitude of temperature forecasts generated by computer models, virtually all of them showing negative deviations. If one compares the forecasted temperatures for this winter with the temperatures experienced last winter (the far left side of the chart), they look similar, but the forecasted temperature anomalies don't show the move back to zero as experienced last summer. That would suggest that in the United States we may not experience the extreme heat witnessed last summer.Sounds like to me, global cooling. But then that's just me. And ImpactWeather, a Houston-based weather forecasting and consulting firm.
NiMin Energy, headquartered in Carpenteria, is applying its patented combined miscible drive (CMD) technology, which involves injecting a pure oxygen and water foam solution into underground oil reservoirs, in turn creating steam and carbon dioxide (CO2) through a wet combustion process. The steam and CO2 reduce the oil's viscosity, allowing it to flow toward horizontal wells.
By Crescent Point Energy Corp.'s ViewfieldAgain, this is the Canadian Bakken, but with 40,000+ wells yet to be drilled in the Williston Basin Bakken, plenty of time to experiment with waterflooding.
Bakken waterflood pilot programs are showing positive initial results and could encourage other production to attempt secondary recovery on other tight oil plays.
The prize is a big one as many of western Canada's tighter resource plays have large-in-place volumes but relatively low recovery factors. Secondary recovery has the potential of boosting the amount of oil recovered from the reservoirs while slowing the high decline rate typically encountered with multistage fracturing of tight oil formations.
According the Dundee report, Crescent Point's first Bakken pilot, comprised of four horizontal producers and one injector, began injecting water in the fourth quarter of 2006, with production response identified in the third quarter of 2008.
Wood said the first pilot saw a robust production response through the back part of 2008 and into much of 2009. Since reaching peak production rates of about 550 bbls per day, production has declined about 25 percent over the past two years.
"Our community just can't support a massive amount of people moving into it," Jacobson said. "It's not that we don't want people moving into our community – we do," she said. "We just don't want to be inundated with oil workers."November 23, 2011: city council okays "man-camp": -- for construction workers
"We really don't want a bunch of men living in a building all together."
A tiny North Dakota town that banned dormitory-style housing for oilfield workers will allow a Colorado company to lodge homebuilders in an old school house.Yup.
Feland says it made no difference to the city or its residents whether it was oil workers or construction workers occupying the building. She said the issue was the number of workers.
Oil is the most important hydrocarbon produced in the state, but oil was not discovered until 1951 when Amerada Hess Corporation completed the Clarence Iverson #1 on the Nesson anticline.
Since then, oil exploration has been nearly continuous in the state. The discovery well was completed in the Silurian Interlake Formation but subsequent development on the anticline focused on the Mississippian Madison Group.The point is this: the oil industry has been producing oil from the Madison formation from almost the very beginning.
The dams were built to be flexible in balancing out demand. Now, they’re increasingly balancing out supply as well. The installation of 3,500 megawatts of wind capacity—expected to rise to 6,000 megawatts by 2013—in Bonneville’s territory has made load balancing more complex. Most of the wind capacity in the Northwest is concentrated in just a few locations along the Columbia River. When the wind blows there, they generate close to capacity; when the wind stops blowing, they generate close to nothing. And they can go from nothing to full output in as little as a couple of hours.
Renewable energy has reinvigorated the market for ‘flexible dispatch’ electricity that can be produced at a moment’s notice, and hydropower is the biggest source of flexible dispatch available—and is much cheaper to run than the natural-gas turbines that serve that market in other parts of the country. “Hydro is the silver bullet, and we didn’t even know it,” says Julien Dumoulin-Smith, an electric utilities analyst at UBS.
Again, the Bakken as a technology laboratory.Slickwater Green Customizable Powdered Blend uses the latest green chemistry
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Believe it or not, America’s biggest oil-producing oil patch has been experiencing a fuel shortage for the last four months.This has been reported earlier, but this article provides more insight to the problem and how it is being managed.
“I haven’t seen it this bad since the ’70s,” states Mike Rud, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association.
While the average consumer may not have been aware, partly because this is mainly a diesel fuel shortage, and partly because of efforts made by Rud and his constituents, Rud does believe that soon, everyone will notice that there is a problem.
According to Rud, the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association has been working overtime to absorb the brunt of this fuel shortage by issuing ‘hours of service’ waivers to drivers bringing in fuel.
“Right now, semis are sitting in lines for three to four hours and sometimes the entire day to wait for fuel.
The ‘hours of service’ waiver gives fuel drivers additional time to bring in fuel,” states Rud.
According to former truck driver, Roger Maki, this is a huge help.
“It takes time to get to Billings or Mandan,” states Maki. “Without the waiver, a driver may only be able to bring in one or two loads of fuel. But, with the waiver, they can bring in an extra load of fuel, which really helps.”
And, with the weather becoming colder, both Maki and Rud state that marketers will be switching from the number two diesel to the number one.