Random Note on New Frontier Midstream -- In the Bakken

I don't recall posting anything about this company previously, although it's possible. Whatever, it's posted now, alerted by a reader. Thank you.

New Frontier Midstream, LLC

First, the press release of June 27, 2012:

• to build a new 65-mile natural gas pipeline (6") and parallel crude oil pipeline (8") in southwest ND
• $250 million project: natural gas, crude oil, NGL, and produced water infrastructure
• products from Bakken, Three Forks, and Lodgepole
• from Stark County, ND, to Fallon County, MT
• finalizing site location near South Heart, ND: a new 40-million cubic feet per day cryogenic plant
• will tie in with ONEOK's gathering system, including the Williston Basin Interstate Pipeline (NG)
• first phase to be complete by 2Q13

For comparison's sake, the ONEOK cryogenic facilities in North Dakota are 100-million cfpd

Eckard Global, LLC, is the holding company. It is now operating primarily in North Dakota and Texas; previously in Alabama and Louisiana.

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

Note to newbies: when I started this blog, I purposely avoid talking about natural gas. I didn't understand it and the Bakken was considered an oily field, not a gassy field. I had to add a "NG" page tab at the top as one way to manage the NG posts. I have not updated that page in a long time.

Interestingly enough, liquid natural gas is now a big story in the Bakken. It looks like it will be getting bigger. There is a significant amount of chatter suggesting that "natural gas will break out" in 2013, and that there will be a substantial rise in the price of natural gas next year.

I may not "understand" natural gas much more than when I started blogging, but whatever I think I know, I have to thank a) RBN Energy, and, b) my readers for alerting me to some great stories.

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

Note to the Granddaughters

It is likely that one of our two granddaughters will enjoy sailing when she grows up. I hope I'm right and I hope I live long enough to see that.

Right now I am reading a fascinating biography of the Atlantic Ocean, by Simon Winchester, c. 2010, reading from an "uncorrected proof, not for sale" edition. For those interested in biographies of great sea bodies, an even more impressive biography is The Great Sea, by David Abulafia, the story of the Mediterranean Sea. I have posted some notes on this book, which I purchased this past year at Books on Broadway in Williston.

Perhaps the most fascinating story that connects both the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea is the tale of the murex snail. I thought I had posted a fairly long history of the "murex" somewhere on this blog, but I can't find it now. Perhaps it was posted on the original MDW blog which was deleted with a single keystroke a few years ago. Maybe I will try to re-create that post some day.

[murex snail --> 1892, bulk oil tanker --> Murex oil company (North Dakota)]

Other fascinating trivia is how much our general conversation tracks back to great ocean events of the past. I suppose I am the only one who did not know this, from Simon Winchester's book, p. 126:

All five of the space shuttle fleet were named after pioneering surface ships, two of them American, three British. Columbia was named to honor the first American vessel to circumnavigate the world, Atlantis after a stalwart research vessel of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts...Discovery and Endeavor, the latter deliberately spelled in the English manner, both carried James Cook on his eighteenth-century global navigations; and Challenger was named after the ship of the 1872 - 1876 voyages. 

And I know I was the only high school graduate to not know that the HMS Challenger was a corvette, nor even what a corvette is/was.

The older granddaughter (age 9) wants to be a marine biologist. The great oceanographic institutions are (name, location, established): Scripps, California, 1892; Woods Hole, Massachusetts, 1930; Lamont-Doherty, New York, 1949; and, the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. Smaller European ocean stations are located in Roscoff, Kiel, and Heligoland.

Prince Albert 1 of Monaco was fully invested in field oceanography; the International Hydrographic Office has been in Monaco since 1921.

From page 147, the Atlantic Ocean begins:

... to be pedantic about it, in the lakes of Zambia (where the Congo rises) and in the Swiss Alps (where a glacier drips to form the tributaries of the Rhone). It also begins in a valley near America's Yellowstone National Park, where a late Victorian explorer named Bruce found the source waters of the Missouri River, and beside which today a Greek farmer, a long way form his old home beside the Mediterranean, lives out his life as an American rancher, raising sheep.

Wow.

I do not know if this is related, but it is intriguing:

The 13-mile section [of the Gallatin River] between Greek Creek and Spanish Creek along the Gallatin are Class 2 to 4 rapids. 

From the net:

Unbeknownst to most anglers, the Gallatin River served as the stunt double for the Big Blackfoot River during the filming of Norman MacLean’s, A River Runs Through It. One of the three forks of the Missouri, the Gallatin was named after Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury during the Lewis and Clark expedition. 

I would not have posted that little bit of trivia except for fact that A River Runs Through It is one of my younger daughter's favorite movies, and perhaps connects the two of us as much as anything.

Simon Winchester has made an excellent observation, starting on page 149, connecting the Atlantic Ocean with Shakespear's final work, The Tempest. It is one of several Shakespearian plays I have not yet read; I am familiar with the play for any number of reasons, but with the Winchester observation, it becomes even more intriguing. When I read the passage he writes, suggesting that Shakespeare heard the study of a shipwrecked boat in the Bermudas that led to his writing the play, the name "Henry James" flashed in front of me. There is no reason, no connection, except perhaps the incredible ability of great writers to take a single (sometimes mundane, sometimes not) data point and develop it into a great play or a great novel.