North Dakota Farmers Love Fracking; No Shortage Of Water In North Dakota For Fracking; Largest Shale Oil Field In The US? The Permian; Why Windmill / Solar Energy Is Not Stored In Batteries

Wow, this is an incredible story. Farmers love fracking! The Bismarck Tribune is reporting: 

Curt Trulson’s got a good deal going with the oil company putting in 12 wells behind his farm headquarters just east of Ross.

They’ll pump water out of his slough to hydraulic fracture the wells and maybe he’ll get some of his farmland back.

It’s wet up there in Mountrail County and the amount of farmland being swallowed by sloughs and potholes has quadrupled in recent years. Trulson will have to leave half the slough water for wildlife by State Water Commission rules, but that still leaves plenty for the oil industry. And maybe some of the 350 acres of farmland that’s now under water will dry out.

Oasis Petroleum needs in the range of 33 million gallons of water to frack 11 more wells on the two-section spacing unit north of Trulson’s farm headquarters. One lease-holder well was completed a few years ago and now the company is in-filling with two, six-well pads on either end of the unit.

Fracking, an injection process that has a huge appetite for water, will start in June and Trulson’s brimming slough lies conveniently in the middle of it all.

Water is a 6 billion-gallon annual business in the oil patch, and these localized arrangements compete with established water depots and to an extent, with the state-subsidized Western Area Water Supply regional pipeline system.

So many story lines. I've been reporting "forever" that if you have one well, you will have a dozen before it's over. 

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Nice article sent in by Steve. The New York Times is reporting:

Energy storage is crucial to transforming the electric grid into a clean, sustainable, low-emissions system, the experts say. And it’s happening already, just not the way most consumers would expect.

The simplest idea for storage — charging up batteries at night when there is a lot of wind energy and not much demand for it, or at midday when the sun is bright — is years from being feasible, according to the experts.

The reason? It costs hundreds of dollars to store a kilowatt-hour of energy in a battery, while nationally the average retail price of a kilowatt-hour is about 11 cents. On the wholesale market, even buying low at off-peak periods and selling high could earn a battery owner perhaps 25 or 30 cents for each $400 or so invested. For that kind of transaction, “storage is not profitable,” said Jay Apt, executive director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center.

There's a lot more to the story, but that's all I need to know.

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And Some Folks Thought The Permian Was Dead After Fifty Years Of Pumping Oil

The San Antonio Express-News is reporting:

Shale fields across the U.S. continue to push out greater amounts of oil, according to a new government report.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that domestic shale-oil production will increase to about 4.3 million barrels daily in May, up 71,000 barrels daily over this month.

It estimates the Eagle Ford will produce about 1.38 million barrels daily in May, up from April’s level of 1.35 million barrels per day.

That’s an increase of about 38 percent from May 2013. Eagle Ford wells are also likely getting better — the EIA estimates that new wells make 463 daily barrels in April but will make 470 daily barrels in May.

The Railroad Commission said the Permian Basin produced 968,696 daily barrels of crude oil in January.

The EIA data show the Permian as the biggest shale-oil field in the U.S., making an estimated 1.44 million barrels daily this month. The EIA projects Permian Basin production will rise to 1.45 million barrels daily in May.

The state data are based on what has been reported by operators and generally get revised upward over time. (For the Permian Basin, state data also includes only Texas production. The field extends into eastern New Mexico).

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The New York Times also has a long meandering article on the state of energy in North America, from the western Canadian sands to Mexico. I kept looking for a theme, or something new; maybe others will see things I did not. This jumped out at me, though I was aware of it, had just forgotten about it:

In September, Royal Dutch Shell announced its intention to sell 100,000 acres it had leased in the Eagle Ford shale field of South Texas because of out-of-control costs. An analyst at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies has estimated asset write-downs approaching $35 billion in recent years among 15 of the main operators in the shale gas and oil fields, a tiny percentage of the total investment but a sign that shale field development is sensitive to market shifts and drilling disappointments.

EOG says their wells pay for themselves in six months in the Eagle Ford.