Friday, October 10, 2014
NIneteen (19) New North Dakota Permits -- October 10, 2014
Active rigs:
Wells coming off the confidential list today were posted earlier; see sidebar at the right.
Nineteen (19) new permits --
Three (3) producing wells completed:
Add two more "famous character names" to the list of "famous character names" Emerald Oil has used to name their wells:
| 10/10/2014 | 10/10/2013 | 10/10/2012 | 10/10/2011 | 10/10/2010 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active Rigs | 190 | 185 | 187 | 196 | 156 |
Wells coming off the confidential list today were posted earlier; see sidebar at the right.
Nineteen (19) new permits --
- Operators: CLR (6), Emerald Oil (5), Newfield (4), XTO (2), Denbury, Oasis,
Fields: Alkali Creek (McKenzie), Boxcar Butte (McKenzie) Westberg (McKenzie), Bear Creek (Dunn), Missouri Ridge (Williams), Catwalk (Williams),Cedar Hills (Bowman),
Comments:
Three (3) producing wells completed:
- 26768, 1,795, EOG, Mandaree 28-05H, Squaw Creek, one section, t10/14; cum --
- 26777, 940, EOG, Mandaree 135-05H, Squaw Creek, one section, t10/14; cum --
- 27756, 863, EOG, Parshall 74-2127H, Parshall, Bakken, ICO (1920), t9/14; cum --
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Emerald Oil: Well Names
Add two more "famous character names" to the list of "famous character names" Emerald Oil has used to name their wells:
- 29674, loc, Emerald Oil, Clark Griswold Federal 6-17-20H,
- 29675, loc, Emerald Oil, Clark Griswold Federal 5-17-20H,
- 29676, loc, Emerald Oil, Clark Griswold Federal 4-17-20H,
- 29677, loc, Emerald Oil, Billy Ray Valentine 5-8-5H,
- 29678, loc, Emerald Oil, Billy Ray Valentine 5-8-5H,
On The Road To New England; Cost Is Trivial; The Grid May Fail -- October 10, 2014
This is a most incredible story.
When the EPA proposed new coal-plant rules, they estimated that 10 GW of electricity would be "lost," or "banned" or "outlawed."
It turns out the estimate of slightly less than 10 GW was greatly off-target, by a factor of 7 times. CNS News is reporting that the total loss of electricity will more than 70 GW when the EPA rules go into effect.
When the EPA proposed new coal-plant rules, they estimated that 10 GW of electricity would be "lost," or "banned" or "outlawed."
It turns out the estimate of slightly less than 10 GW was greatly off-target, by a factor of 7 times. CNS News is reporting that the total loss of electricity will more than 70 GW when the EPA rules go into effect.
Power plants generating 72 gigawatts (GW) of electricity in 37 states have either closed or are scheduled to shut their doors to comply with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, according to the Institute for Energy Research (IER).
The loss of generating capacity is “over seven times the amount originally predicted by EPA modeling,” IER’s updated report, released October 7, noted.
Over 94 percent of the closures involve coal-fired power plants, which currently provide one-fifth of the nation’s electricity, even though coal was the only fuel that was able to keep up with the higher demand during last January's polar vortex.
The result will be higher utility prices and lower reliability, IER warned.
“This past winter demonstrated in real time the value of the existing coal fleet. During the winter of 2014, coal was the only fuel with the ability to meet demand increases for electricity, providing 92 percent of incremental electricity in January/February, 2014 versus the same months in 2013,” the IER report stated.When I read this report, the "cost" seems to be the less important point. The bigger point is that the grid may simply fail if the EPA rules are allowed to go into effect. A grid failure is not trivial.
Monster "Snake" Wells In Antelope Oil Field -- October 10, 2014
Locator: 10010SNAKE.
Updates
May 6, 2024: these monster wells updated.
May 22, 2020: these monster wells updated.
January 11, 2019:
- 32832, 1,710, Enerplus, Garter 152-94-18A-19H, Antelope, t9/17; cum 451K 11/21; cum 460K 5/22; 486K 3/24;
November 29, 2015: the Bull and the Rattle wells are huge!
June 17, 2015: production update for the "Ribbon" well has been posted.
Original Post
At the bottom of that post I have a screen shot and asked readers if they saw the same thing I was seeing.
Yesterday I was impressed by the fact that the immediate area in which this well was drilled has had a spectacular history with some great wells. Some wells drilled back in the late 1950s are still active (rare); and many of the wells (drilled from the late 50's) have/had a total production of almost 1 million bbls of oil, many from two payzones, the Madison and the Sanish.
In the big scheme of things (look at the Grail, the Truax, the Parshall, the Banks, the Sanish, etc) this area has hardly been touched with horizontal wells. (Compare the Truax screen shot at the very bottom of this post.)
But now that I've seen the file report, this well has even more surprises.
First two screen shots.
The first screen shot provides an overview of the general area:
The wells of interest:
- 4240, PA/AB/391/25/45, Hess, AMU H-517HR (a re-entry well), Devonian/Sanish/Madison, t5/67; t7/91; t10/06; cum 206K (6/91); 3K (5/05); 75K (12/16); as far as I can tell, never fracked; went inactive on/about 4/14; back on active status 6/15; inactive 8/17;
- 18435, 2,376, XTO, Nelson Federal 41X-5G, Antelope-Sanish pool, 11 stages; 1.3 million lbs sand/ceramic; t3/11; cum 337K 3/20; went inactive 5/15; back on status 1/16; off line 10/18; back on line 4/19; cum 390K 11/21; cum 400K 5/22; cum 416K 3/23; cum 431K 3/24;
- 24337, 2,519, EOG, Hawkeye 3-2413H, Antelope-Sanish pool (all EOG paperwork says "Bakken" but "Sanish" is inked in on most recent sundry form -- this is a Sanish pool well); 28 stages; 9.7 million lbs sand; t5/13; cum 817K 3/20; cum 872K 11/21; cum 891K 5/22; cum 921K 3/23; cum 950K 3/24;
- 26737, 3,374,
Enerplus, Ribbon 152-94-18B-19H,
Antelope-Sanish, again, much of the paperwork
says "Bakken," and the target was clearly the middle Bakken (middle
Bakken "C") but the scout ticket says the Sanish pool; 42 days (316
hours) of
drilling; 42 stages; 10.0 million lbs sand; t4/14; cum 650K 3/20; cum 667K 11/21; cum 674K 5/22; cum 681K 3/23; cum 688K 3/24;
- 26990, 3,102, Enerplus, Hognose 152-94-18B-19H-TF, Antelope-Sanish, specifically Three Forks 2nd bench, three laterals; 60 days (533 hours) drilling, 41 stages; 9.7 million lbs sand; t4/14; cum 573K 3/20; cum 598K 11/21; cum 605K 5/22; cum 611K 3/23; cum 618K 3/24;
- 26990, Hognose 152-94-18B-19H-TF
- Hognose 152-94-18B-19H-TF-ST1
- Hognose 152-94-18B-19H-TF-ST2
- 26988, 2,842, Enerplus, Bull 152-94-18B-19H-TF, Antelope-Sanish, t6/15; cum 557K 3/20; off line 3/20; back on line 5/20; cum 588K 11/21; cum 620K 3/23; cum 642K 3/24;
- 26989, 2,357, Enerplus, Rattle 152-94-18B-19H, Antelope-Sanish, t6/15; cum 418K 3/20; off line 3/20; back on line 6/20; cum 438K 11/21; cum 450K 3/23; cum 457K 3/24;
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Formation tops / stratigraphy for the Ribbon well (#26737):
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Note the markers, "A" through "E" for the middle Bakken. I've seen these markers in other well reports. Note the thickness of the middle Bakken, TVD (10,359 - 10,318 feet = 41 feet).
On the log reports, the formation tops (TVD):
- lower Bakken shale: 10,359 feet
- Three Forks - 1st bench: 10,383 feet
- Three Forks "RT": 10,419 feet
- Three Forks - 2nd bench: 10,431 feet
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For The Archives
For The Archives
Compare the development of the area of the Antelope oil field (noted above) with the development of a small area of the Truax oil field -- this is what surprised me most by the snake wells announced today. This screen shot taken the same day as the other screen shots above:
Excellent Update On Natural Gas Pipeline Activity In Louisiana And What It Means -- RBN Energy -- October 10, 2014
Active rigs:
RBN Energy: Louisiana, Henry Hub, and natural gas.
Bakken.com is reporting:
| 10/10/2014 | 10/10/2013 | 10/10/2012 | 10/10/2011 | 10/10/2010 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active Rigs | 192 | 185 | 187 | 196 | 156 |
RBN Energy: Louisiana, Henry Hub, and natural gas.
At first glance, the recent purchase of a natural gas pipeline network in southern Louisiana by EnLink Midstream from Chevron does not look very exciting.
One of the assets - the Sabine pipeline – backbone of the Henry Hub CME NYMEX natural gas futures contract - reported losses of $7.5 Million and total flows averaging only 200 MMcf/d in 2013.
So what is the value of the pipelines tied to the world’s third largest futures contract?
Turns out the Henry Hub futures contract generates some pretty good revenue for the pipeline operator without moving a molecule of gas. And there’s a bright future ahead for gas pipeline networks in Louisiana these days. We explain why in today’s blog.
At the end of September 2014, EnLink Midstream (formed in March 2014 by a merger between Crosstex Energy and Devon Midstream Holdings) paid Chevron $235 million for three natural gas pipeline systems in Southern Louisiana – the Sabine pipeline, the Bridgeline system and the Chandeleur system.
The assets include about 1,400 miles of pipeline from Beaumont, TX, to the Mississippi River corridor.
In addition to the pipeline and storage assets, the deal makes EnLink the owner and operator of 13 major interstate and intrastate connections to the Sabine pipeline that between them form the Henry Hub delivery mechanism for the CME NYMEX natural gas futures contract.
So given that the NYMEX futures contract trades average volumes of roughly 3000 Bcf/d (that’s for all delivery contracts – it works out about 40 times the daily dry gas production of 75 Bcf/d) you would think that Henry Hub would be the busiest physical gas interchange in the world. But you would be wrong. Go to the linked article to find out why.Bu there was more to the article that shed more light on the North American energy revolution:
Louisiana is ground zero for a renaissance in US manufacturing and processing plants being built to take advantage of abundant U.S. supplies of cheap shale gas. Louisiana will also be home to at least 4 Bcf/d of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity as well as new gas fired power generation capacity in Louisiana and Florida in the next few years.
This time instead of from the Gulf of Mexico – most of the gas to feed this new demand will be coming south from the Northeast – home to prolific Marcellus and Utica gas production that has already reached nearly 17 Bcf/d (September 2014) and continues to grow rapidly. How will all that gas move south?
An RBN blog series earlier this year documented the build out of new gas pipeline infrastructure south and east from the Marcellus to the Gulf Coast – many of them reversals of pipes that previously flowed the other way. We expect about 16 Bcf/d of capacity to come online in the next five years to move gas into the Gulf Coast region.
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Kentucky Fried Chicken -- Nevada Style -- Not Coming To California
Bakken.com is reporting:
A solar-energy company has dropped a proposal to build a 75-story solar tower near California’s Joshua Tree National Park employing a kind of solar technology that can cause birds to ignite in midair.
The California Energy Commission was slated to vote on BrightSource Energy’s project this month, before the company withdrew its application.
The plant would have used “power tower” technology that trains concentrated solar power on steam boiler towers. State and federal officials and conservation groups say a similar BrightSource tower near the Nevada border proved unexpectedly deadly to birds that flew through the concentrated rays.
Nobel Peace Prize Announced! A Reminder To Visit Bakken.Com -- October 9, 2014
If you are interested in the Bakken, you need to be visiting the Bakken.com website daily.
I could be wrong, but the site pretty much reports the story without editorial comment.
Two more races in the Contender Round: Charlotte (Saturday) and Talladega (October 19). Charlotte is on ABC so I can watch it at home. Talladega is on ESPN so I will need to visit a sports restaurant if I want to see it live (or stream it on the internet).
After Charlotte and Talladega, we go into the Eliminator Round with three races: Martinsville, Texas Motor Speedway (just down the road from where I currently reside), and Phoenix.
The Championship Round, actually, the Championship "RACE" is scheduled for November 16, 2014, at Homestead-Miami.
November 16th? I could be on the road.
I could be wrong, but the site pretty much reports the story without editorial comment.
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NASCAR
Two more races in the Contender Round: Charlotte (Saturday) and Talladega (October 19). Charlotte is on ABC so I can watch it at home. Talladega is on ESPN so I will need to visit a sports restaurant if I want to see it live (or stream it on the internet).
After Charlotte and Talladega, we go into the Eliminator Round with three races: Martinsville, Texas Motor Speedway (just down the road from where I currently reside), and Phoenix.
The Championship Round, actually, the Championship "RACE" is scheduled for November 16, 2014, at Homestead-Miami.
November 16th? I could be on the road.
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The Wall Street Journal
President Obama looking for ways to get around Congress to close Guantanomo. It's all politics. What does it matter? -- Hillary
Turkey sits out battle on Syria border.
Amazon will open a brick-and-mortar site in NYC. Mistake.
WSJ survey is bullish on the economy.
Immigrant wave resurges. A strengthening US economy has spurred the largest pickup in immigration since before the recession, driven by Asian newcomers and a gain in Hispanic arrivals
German exports dropped. A country in trouble. How are those sanctions working out?
Six US military planes with US Marines landed in Ebolaland. [Ebolaland is a geographically undefined are of West Africa much like Kurdistan.]
Price drop tests oil drillers. Much more to come.
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Hmmmm..... this is interesting, and perhaps the biggest news of the day: Lego willend its contract with Shell. Link here. It's no longer politically correct:
In July, Greenpeace circulated an online petition calling for Lego to sever its ties with Shell, which it has accused of operating recklessly in exploring for oil in the Arctic region. Shell suspended an Arctic drilling program offshore Alaska in 2013 but has kept its options open for another attempt. It has also conducted Arctic or near-Arctic work elsewhere.
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Wow. iPhone 6 demand is so great that the smartphone is delaying Apple's rollout of a larger iPad. Apple is struggling to make enough new iPhones to meet strong demand. I am an Apple fanboy but have never owned an iPhone, and probably never will. But after seeing the iPhone 6 side-by-side with the iPhone 5, I can see why iPhone 6 is selling so well. The iPhone 6 makes the iPHone look old and clunky. If the iPhone 6 is a Ferrari, the iPhone 5 is last year's Volvo.
Hackers stole Fidelity data. Too.
Russian companies are clamoring for dollars to repay and refinance debt, adding to the relentless pressure on the crumbling ruble.
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The Los Angeles Times
Wow, this irritates me. I had her as the winner; I was late in posting my guess. Nobel Peace Prize goes to Kailash Satyrarthi and Malal Yousafzai. Yousafzai is an Indian children's rights advocate, age 17, the youngest winner in history, and Satyrathi is an Indian children's rights advocate. They did a bit more than tout a PowerPoint presentation. The Nobel committee has redeemed themselves.
Chief of Juarez drug cartel is captured, unfortunately not killed.
Proposes settlement over San Onofre plant closure is revised. Consumer advocacy groups not happy:
Rhiannon, Fleetwood Mac
Chief of Juarez drug cartel is captured, unfortunately not killed.
Proposes settlement over San Onofre plant closure is revised. Consumer advocacy groups not happy:
Both the earlier proposed agreement and the one released Thursday would cost ratepayers approximately $3.3 billion over 10 years, while the power companies' stockholders would be on the hook for about $1.4 billion.
"It's the same bottom line," said Matthew Freedman, a lawyer for the Utility Reform Network, a San Francisco consumer group that participated in the settlement negotiations.Fleetwood Mac adds tour dates. Wow, these folks must be as old as I am.
Peak Oil Is Not Mentioned In This Story But Should Be; Technology Producing Tsunami Of Oil -- Rigzone -- October 10, 2014
Reuters/Rigzone has a long article on the challenges facing the oil majors due to the sharp decline in oil prices. It begins:
[Update, 1:31 p.m. CDT: Can you believe this -- what incredibly coincidental timing:
Satellite sees hot spot of methane in US Southwest. Just hours after posting the note below, the linked story is posted Who wudda thought?]
It's hard to believe I actually mentioned Judith Nies' Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West, c. 2014, on three separate occasions.
I finally finished the book. I enjoyed it up until the last chapter, but was starting to lose interest by Chapter 11, "The Bechtel Family Business." But I slogged through the last chapter, and can now go back and read various chapters again that were most interesting. I think it's a "must-read" for the intellectually curious who plan to visit the Grand Canyon area for the first time. Anyone who has visited the southwest should enjoy the book.
For my conservative friends and readers, be forewarned: Judith Nies writes for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Harvard Review. She has an agenda.
I wrote the following in an e-mail to a reader who wrote to tell me he appreciated the recommendation (I hope he was not being sarcastic). He was much more cognizant of the author's agenda, something I initially missed and did not notice until the second or third chapter.
I was suckered a bit into reading it -- from the title. I did not know the author's background, and I did not pay attention to Bill McKibben's endorsement of the book until I had read it. His endorsement led the list of endorsements on the jacket back.
However, on balance, it was one of the better books I have read in a long time -- the blog has helped me a lot. I saw her slant immediately (okay, the second or third chapter) but was able to calmly ignore it. Compared to the vitriol in blogs on the net (including my frequent rants), the book seemed fairly tame.
I ignored her "green" comments. [For example, somewhere in the book she mentions that some folks have not transitioned from "global warming" to"climate change" or were late in doing so. Fortunately for her she has not transitioned to "extreme weather" because we're not seeing that either.]
I did not grow up in the Far West but left Williston at age 22 to go to graduate school in Los Angeles. I have spent a fair amount of time in Las Vegas (Air Force connection). I am fascinated by Los Angeles and Las Vegas; there is certainly a huge connection between the two.
[I am also fascinated with Boston / NYC and in my personal life there are parallels between West Coast and East Coast, but those stories will have to wait until my memoir / "tell-all" book comes out. LOL But I digress.]
I enjoyed Unreal City because I never knew the history of the Far West, specifically Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Her book was incredibly superficial and incredibly meandering (like my blog). By the time I finished reading it, it seemed to be more a travelogue (her visit to the Far West) rather than a well-thought out, deeply researched book. At only 243 pages (before one gets to extensive notes and index) it is a very short book. It was also a homage to her Navajo guide, a very elderly woman who might be the Saint Theresa of the Black Mesa.
The book is very superficial, but it provides someone with absolutely no knowledge of the subject a starting point.
As noted earlier, the author meanders, and she often repeats herself, but I found these subjects very,very interestng:
The biggest takeaway for me was the issue of water. There is no question in my mind that water (and electricity) for Los Angeles and Las Vegas are much, much bigger stories than folks realize. It's possible the cities will muddle through their challenges for the next 20 years and I will not live long enough to see how this movie ends. But one certainly gets the feeling that Las Vegas is living on borrowed time -- if they can't solve the water problem. Congress will have to pick winners and losers among three cities: Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. Mexico, of course, has to be quite concerned. Congress will also have to pick winner and losers among growers in California and gamblers in Las Vegas.
Solar and wind energy will barely put a dent in all the energy that is required, but one can see why folks in the Far West have put so much faith in "all of the above." They are going to need "all of the above" if they expect to have the energy they need. Shutting down nuclear plants in San Onofre is going to be hard to replace.
It was a superficial book, it meandered, but it introduced me to histories of the cities, the region, the politicians, the Hopi-Navajo fight, the Mormons, Bechtel, Peabody. Now when I drive by the Navajo Generating Station I will have a feeling for the history.
The good news: I don't think the author left me with a "bad" feeling about the Mormons, the politicians, the corporations. It is simply "what it is." It's a "dog eat dog" world out there, a fight to survive, and I simply find it fascinating. I'm glad I'm just a spectator. There are some serious issues that are not going to be easily solved.
Like all good authors, Nies sprinkled her book with a number of factoids and/or trivia that put things in perspective. She mentioned golf courses/water on three different occasions (per the index) to include this bit of trivia:
Many people mistakenly think coal use has faded away or died out since the Industrial Revolution. In The Quest, copyright 2012, Daniel Yergin's exhaustive and influential book on energy sources, he points out that this is fault thinking: "Since 2000, thought not recognized, the biggest increase in global energy output has come from coal -- double that from oil and triple that from natural gas."
Tribal councils were set up by the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s as a way of organziing Indian tribal structure to fit into the American legal system.
Outside of early coastal settlement (Washington, Oregon, and California), no single entity did more to settle the Far West than the Mormons. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada is a non-tithing Mormon.
If one had to name one company that built most of the big projects in the Far West in the first half of the 20th century, one would not be wrong suggesting Bechtel.
Tuba City began as a Mormon settlement in the 1870s. Although is is on the Navajo reservation, it is near the Hopi town of Moencopi and names for a Hopi headman called Chief Toova.
In 1905, Senator William Clark, came to establish the new town site (eventually Las Vegas) for his railroad depot. Las Vegas is located in Clark County. Senator William Clark was originally from Butte, Montana. He bought the land from Helen Stewart; Clark earned $250,000 ($6 million in today's dollars) flipping that land to individual investors. The Spanish had named the spot las vegas, "the meadows."
An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons or the amount of water needed to cover a football field (roughly an acre) with a foot of water. One-acre foot is generally calculated as enough water to supply two families for one year.
Although Hoover Dam is generally believed to have been a great public works project of the New Deal administration during the Depression, it was actually a construction project built by private enterprise, funded by the government, and put in motion by the business-oriented Hoover administration to help the landowners of the Imperial Valley of Southern California.
Although some people still believe that Las Vegas sits on top of a liitless aquifer and that natural springs feed the lush green golf courses, the reality is that Las Vegas's unallocagted groundwater was mostly pumped out by the 1960s. Today, 90 percent of Las Vegas water comes from the three hundred thousand acre-feet allocated from Lake Mead and the ever-diminishing waters of the Colorado River.
The important Lake Mead numbers:
This year's fall in energy prices is hastening the decline of big oil, as the seven Western majors sell-off assets, cut investment, return money to shareholders and shrink in size, leaving ever more output to small producers and state firms.
Companies that were already deep in the red when the price of Brent was at $109 a barrel last year are having to redraw business plans for prices as low as $90. With promised shareholder dividends probably untouchable for now, they will have to divest, cut costs and borrow more against a smaller business just to make ends meet.
And unlike in previous downturns, they are no longer big enough to ensure that their own cutbacks will drive prices and profits back up. According to Morgan Stanley analysts, the seven majors - Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Total and Statoil - ran a collective deficit of $55 billion last year. They generated $207 billion of operating cash flow but invested $209 billion in capital expenditure and returned $53 billion to shareholders in dividends.Later in the article:
In 2003, Exxon, Shell, BP, Total, Chevron and Eni produced 11.5 million barrels of oil liquids per day, or 14.5 percent of global output of 79.6 million bpd. Fast forward 10 years and their smaller output of 9.5 million bpd is equivalent to only 10.4 percent of larger global production of 91.6 million bpd.
"Oil majors have very little leverage over actual oil prices today," said Jason Gammel, analyst at Jefferies.
Meanwhile the engine of today's growth in oil output - the U.S. shale oil boom - is driven mainly by mid-sized and small producers such as Anadarko, Apache, Occidental and Devon, rather than the majors.
And technology improves so fast on U.S. fields that what looked uneconomical two years ago looks economical today, even with lower prices. According to an analysis from Barclays, 90 percent of production from the U.S. Bakken province will still be profitable even if oil prices fall to $60 per barrel.
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A Note to the Granddaughters
[Update, 1:31 p.m. CDT: Can you believe this -- what incredibly coincidental timing:
Satellite sees hot spot of methane in US Southwest. Just hours after posting the note below, the linked story is posted Who wudda thought?]
It's hard to believe I actually mentioned Judith Nies' Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West, c. 2014, on three separate occasions.
I finally finished the book. I enjoyed it up until the last chapter, but was starting to lose interest by Chapter 11, "The Bechtel Family Business." But I slogged through the last chapter, and can now go back and read various chapters again that were most interesting. I think it's a "must-read" for the intellectually curious who plan to visit the Grand Canyon area for the first time. Anyone who has visited the southwest should enjoy the book.
For my conservative friends and readers, be forewarned: Judith Nies writes for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Harvard Review. She has an agenda.
I wrote the following in an e-mail to a reader who wrote to tell me he appreciated the recommendation (I hope he was not being sarcastic). He was much more cognizant of the author's agenda, something I initially missed and did not notice until the second or third chapter.
I was suckered a bit into reading it -- from the title. I did not know the author's background, and I did not pay attention to Bill McKibben's endorsement of the book until I had read it. His endorsement led the list of endorsements on the jacket back.
However, on balance, it was one of the better books I have read in a long time -- the blog has helped me a lot. I saw her slant immediately (okay, the second or third chapter) but was able to calmly ignore it. Compared to the vitriol in blogs on the net (including my frequent rants), the book seemed fairly tame.
I ignored her "green" comments. [For example, somewhere in the book she mentions that some folks have not transitioned from "global warming" to"climate change" or were late in doing so. Fortunately for her she has not transitioned to "extreme weather" because we're not seeing that either.]
I did not grow up in the Far West but left Williston at age 22 to go to graduate school in Los Angeles. I have spent a fair amount of time in Las Vegas (Air Force connection). I am fascinated by Los Angeles and Las Vegas; there is certainly a huge connection between the two.
[I am also fascinated with Boston / NYC and in my personal life there are parallels between West Coast and East Coast, but those stories will have to wait until my memoir / "tell-all" book comes out. LOL But I digress.]
I enjoyed Unreal City because I never knew the history of the Far West, specifically Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Her book was incredibly superficial and incredibly meandering (like my blog). By the time I finished reading it, it seemed to be more a travelogue (her visit to the Far West) rather than a well-thought out, deeply researched book. At only 243 pages (before one gets to extensive notes and index) it is a very short book. It was also a homage to her Navajo guide, a very elderly woman who might be the Saint Theresa of the Black Mesa.
The book is very superficial, but it provides someone with absolutely no knowledge of the subject a starting point.
As noted earlier, the author meanders, and she often repeats herself, but I found these subjects very,very interestng:
- how the Mormons settled the West. I will watch for a book on the history of Mormons in the Far West
- the politics: Harry Reid, Barry Goldwater, Mo Udall
- how Las Vegas got its start
- Peabody Coal
- Bechtel
The biggest takeaway for me was the issue of water. There is no question in my mind that water (and electricity) for Los Angeles and Las Vegas are much, much bigger stories than folks realize. It's possible the cities will muddle through their challenges for the next 20 years and I will not live long enough to see how this movie ends. But one certainly gets the feeling that Las Vegas is living on borrowed time -- if they can't solve the water problem. Congress will have to pick winners and losers among three cities: Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. Mexico, of course, has to be quite concerned. Congress will also have to pick winner and losers among growers in California and gamblers in Las Vegas.
Solar and wind energy will barely put a dent in all the energy that is required, but one can see why folks in the Far West have put so much faith in "all of the above." They are going to need "all of the above" if they expect to have the energy they need. Shutting down nuclear plants in San Onofre is going to be hard to replace.
It was a superficial book, it meandered, but it introduced me to histories of the cities, the region, the politicians, the Hopi-Navajo fight, the Mormons, Bechtel, Peabody. Now when I drive by the Navajo Generating Station I will have a feeling for the history.
The good news: I don't think the author left me with a "bad" feeling about the Mormons, the politicians, the corporations. It is simply "what it is." It's a "dog eat dog" world out there, a fight to survive, and I simply find it fascinating. I'm glad I'm just a spectator. There are some serious issues that are not going to be easily solved.
Like all good authors, Nies sprinkled her book with a number of factoids and/or trivia that put things in perspective. She mentioned golf courses/water on three different occasions (per the index) to include this bit of trivia:
The water [from the Central Arizona Project] goes to irrigation for agricultrue, to municipal water for the city of Phoenix, and to provide one (1) million gallons of water a day for each of Phoenix's 247 golf courses.If that's not a typo, she says one million gallons of water for each golf course, every day.
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Miscellaneous data points from Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and The Fate of the West
Many people mistakenly think coal use has faded away or died out since the Industrial Revolution. In The Quest, copyright 2012, Daniel Yergin's exhaustive and influential book on energy sources, he points out that this is fault thinking: "Since 2000, thought not recognized, the biggest increase in global energy output has come from coal -- double that from oil and triple that from natural gas."
Tribal councils were set up by the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s as a way of organziing Indian tribal structure to fit into the American legal system.
Outside of early coastal settlement (Washington, Oregon, and California), no single entity did more to settle the Far West than the Mormons. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada is a non-tithing Mormon.
If one had to name one company that built most of the big projects in the Far West in the first half of the 20th century, one would not be wrong suggesting Bechtel.
Tuba City began as a Mormon settlement in the 1870s. Although is is on the Navajo reservation, it is near the Hopi town of Moencopi and names for a Hopi headman called Chief Toova.
In 1905, Senator William Clark, came to establish the new town site (eventually Las Vegas) for his railroad depot. Las Vegas is located in Clark County. Senator William Clark was originally from Butte, Montana. He bought the land from Helen Stewart; Clark earned $250,000 ($6 million in today's dollars) flipping that land to individual investors. The Spanish had named the spot las vegas, "the meadows."
An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons or the amount of water needed to cover a football field (roughly an acre) with a foot of water. One-acre foot is generally calculated as enough water to supply two families for one year.
Although Hoover Dam is generally believed to have been a great public works project of the New Deal administration during the Depression, it was actually a construction project built by private enterprise, funded by the government, and put in motion by the business-oriented Hoover administration to help the landowners of the Imperial Valley of Southern California.
Although some people still believe that Las Vegas sits on top of a liitless aquifer and that natural springs feed the lush green golf courses, the reality is that Las Vegas's unallocagted groundwater was mostly pumped out by the 1960s. Today, 90 percent of Las Vegas water comes from the three hundred thousand acre-feet allocated from Lake Mead and the ever-diminishing waters of the Colorado River.
The important Lake Mead numbers:
- 1,219 feet: high-water level mark, when the lake is full; was reached in June, 1941; reached again in 1983
- 1,083.3 feet: water level in February, 2010
- 1,075 feet: the number at which mandatory water cuts go into effect for California, Nevada, and Arizona
- 1,050 feet: the top of the Las Vegas upper intake pipe, a pipe installed in 1971 and from which the 2 million people of Las Vegas get 90 percent of their water. Below this level there is not enough water to run hoover Dam's generators that supply more than 1 million people with electricity. The hydroelectricity also pumps water of the mountains into California
- 1,000 feet: the top of Las Vegas' second intake pipe, built in the 1990s, which has a problem with quagga (zebra) mussels
- 895 feet: at this point Lake Mead is declared a dead pool in which evaporation exceeds inflow. Downriver water delivery to California stops. Electricity generation has already stopped (see above)
- 863 feet: the top of the third Las Vegas intake pipe currently under construction (scheduled for completion in 2014 but delayed until 2015. A special machine, built in Germany, is boring through solid rock a half-mile beneath the surface of the lake. At this level the intake pipe will be draining the dregs of the lake
- elsewhere: according to the Western States Petroleum Association, 323 acre-feet of water were used in fracking 830 wells in California in 2013, compared with 2.7 million acre-feet for agriculture here in Kern County, the heart of California’s oil industry
- elsewhere: aLL fracking in ALL of California used less water than the AVERAGE amount of water to irrigate ONE golf course in California.
ALL fracking in ALL of California used less water than the amount of water required to irrigate ONE AVERAGE golf course in California.
Of course, that begs the next question. How many golf courses ARE there in California? Drum roll ... drum roll ... 1,126