Huge Story: First Reserve, Triangle Form Pipeline Venture

Google  First Reserve, Triangle form pipeline venture

So many story lines from this one story.

Here's the lede:

Private-equity firm First Review Corp has formed a new venture to build pipelines throughout the booming oil fields of North Dakota, an investment aimed at resolving transportation bottlenecks plaguing energy producers in the region.

Data points:

• new company: Caliber Midstream Parners LP
• first pipeline: 10,000 bbls of oil and 15 million cubic feet of natural gas per day by mid-2013
• first pipeline: will connect more than 100 far-flung oil and natural-gas sites to rail terminals
• later pipelines: connectors to major interstate pipelines
• hundreds of thousands of pipelines that need to be built
• "stable market share and still have 100% growth per year"
• First Reserve: $1.2 billion Energy Infrastructure Fund
• break-even price for Triangle Bakken oil with pipelines: $45/bbl

At the beginning, I mentioned there are many story lines from this one announcement. This may be the biggest story line: about two years ago, a reader (personal communication) noted that most of the money flowing into the Bakken was by the operators and the builders themselves. Not a lot of outside money was coming in. The reader noted that the Bakken would move to a new level once "Wall Street money" started flowing to the Bakken. I know nothing about First Reserve but it sounds like a Wall Street firm.

How do I know this is a "huge" story. It is one of only three stories on page B3 of the WSJ; with large-font headline (across four columns of the five-column). I've mentioned before that the biggest news posted in the WSJ is generally on page B3.