Tuesday Morning Links, News, And Views -- Part I

Wells coming off the confidential list have been posted. 

Active rigs: 185

RBN Energy: the RBN Energy folks have had several essays on the CBR terminals being built in Texas/Louisiana to handle Canadian oil. This time the authors "will run through the operating or planned terminals outside the CN direct network that deliver to Mississippi Gulf refineries as well as equivalents on the Texas Gulf Coast in Houston and at Port Arthur. We have confined our survey to those facilities that are handling Canadian heavy crude or have expressed plans to do so."

Rigzone is reporting:

Exploration and production (E&P) companies with onshore U.S. operations need to better understand shale oil formations and to modify certain environmental health and safety (EHS) practices, and these goals are driving technology development among oilfield service companies, according to several members of the service company community.

"We're just in the infancy of our understanding" of shale oil plays, said Tim Ruble, a senior geochemist with Weatherford Laboratories in Houston. "Shale oil represents a much more complex system" than a shale gas formation, he noted.

Weatherford is developing technologies to generate three-dimensional, nano-scale models documenting exactly where the crude oil is present in a shale formation and is helping operating companies decipher the chemical composition and physical characteristics of the oil, Ruble said. The goal is to more clearly illustrate where oil resides, how oil moves within the rock and to provide data about the oil's maturity and API gravity – factors that can help operators to map out the optimal sweet spot for drilling. 

Note: shale oil represents a much more complex system than a shale gas formation. Several comments: I don't know how many times I've mentioned the Bakken has a been a huge laboratory  for shale oil exploration and production. Weatherford has had huge operations in the Williston area for decades. The challenge of shale oil exploration and production helps explain the consistently different results among Bakken operators. The best news: the recovery rates will keep getting better. 

The Billings Gazette has a small "snapshot" of Watford City.

It appears The Dickinson Press is scouring the nation's newspapers to find out what is going on Dickinson's backyard. Today it is an article from a Duluth, MN, writer. Again, the Minnesota writer has the geography wrong, but that's not unexpected. I assume the Duluth writer flew in by plane, using fossil fuels and emitting tons of CO2, and then drove around the oil patch in a gas-guzzling SUV. Whatever he/she used was not mentioned.

Staying in Debbie Downer mode, The Dickinson Press provides us a lengthy article on the increasing number of blowouts in the oil patch. Of course, only raw data was provided, and not a statistical analysis.  The reason for the high IPs in the Bakken has to do with the over-pressurization in some areas. Debbie Downer sees the glass half empty. I am impressed with the technology and the roughnecks that can manage this high pressure challenge. Over 800,000 bopd are produced in North Dakota each day and almost 200 wells are being drilled any give day. Eighteen of the 23 blowouts resulted in less than 10 bbls of fluid (salt water, crude oil) being released (230 bbls) though five of the 23 blowouts were bigger -- between 600 and 2,000 bbls of fluid being released. This, too, is an ankle biter.