Flashback: The Bakken Is a Marginal Play -- Marathon

Updates

Later, 6:56 pm: this is so coincidental. I linked the article below just to show how far the Bakken has come. Now, I notice the year: 2007. This is the same year that had the all-time high for the stock market -- the record that was broken today. No connection, of course, but the "2007" caught my eye.

Original Post

From an old issue of The Bismarck Tribune, Halloween, 2007:

Steve Hinchman, a senior vice president for Marathon Oil Co. said his company has expanded its oil lease acres in North Dakota and is investing big dollars in drilling the middle Bakken formation of the Williston Basin. Hinchman said $100 oil isn't healthy for anybody and at the same time said energy legislation that favors new taxes will increase the cost of oil and damage the county's competitiveness. There's enough room in the county's current and future energy consumption for all types of fuels, he aid. He said the middle Bakken is a "marginal play," one that requires the company to move quickly from one well to the next and with fewer people.

How things have changed.

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

A Note to the Granddaughters

The older granddaughter and I share a lot of time reading and re-reading Moby Dick. From wiki:

Two actual events served as the genesis for Melville's tale. One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820, after it was rammed by a large sperm whale 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the western coast of South America. First mate Owen Chase, one of eight survivors, recorded the events in his 1821 Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex.

Nathaniel Philbrook published the story of the Essex in 2000, In the Heart of the Sea. I have not read that book and probably will not; Moby Dick will suffice.

One thing led to another, and I am now reading Mayflower by Philbrook, the soft cover copyright 2006.

Being from the midwest, I don't recall spending an inordinate amount of time on the Pilgrims in middle school or high school history. Pretty much Squanto, Thanksgiving, and Plymouth Rock is all I remember from my school days, although until reading Mayflower, I had actually forgotten about Squanto, also.

The Mayflower story is absolutely fascinating. I can't imagine anyone on Cape Cod or Boston's south coast not reading this book. For the rest of us, anyone interested in early American history, Philbrick's narrative cannot be beat. I pick books to read based on subject matter of course, but at the end of the day, I won't read a book unless a) it is really good writing; and, b) the esthetics of the book are good (paper, font, feel, binding, etc). And this book exceeds both criteria.