How Crazy Is The Bakken? March 20, 2015

This is a Reuters headline story today: Continental Resources adds to oil acreage at North Dakota.

I was expecting a huge acreage deal. In fact: 160 acres. LOL.

WILLISTON, N.D. (Reuters) - Continental Resources Inc, the second-largest North Dakota oil producer, spent $2.3 million at a state land auction for the right to explore for crude on 160 acres, outbidding its nearest rival with just seconds left on the clock.

How much is a Bakken acre worth these days at depressed oil prices? $2.3 million / 160 acres = $14,375/acre.

The rest of the story:

After five days of online bids from privately held Slawson Exploration Co and others, Continental waited until the last 30 seconds of the auction on March 10 to best privately held Tracker Resource Development III LLC by $100 per acre for a bid of $14,200 per acre.

Much of the land is near or under the eastern part of Lake Sakakawea, the dammed portion of the Missouri River that lies near the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

It's not known how much oil may lie there, though the reservation alone accounts for roughly a third of the state's daily oil output.

Continental already operates a well on a nearby spit of land.

The state, which opened bidding at $5,000 per acre and had hoped for at least $10,000.

Based on the hints of the story ...

• east of Lake Sakakawea
• mostly under the lake
• near the reservation
• CLR already had a well there "on a spit of land"

... this was my guess where the acres were:

So, if my hunch is close, then we look for the results of the most recent on-line auction, and specifically search for T153N-R93W. And here it is:

My hunch this is the lease information based on the hints in the story:

And there it! Section 16, just a mile west of the existing CLR Margaurite permits!

By the way, this was just one incredible lease; there have been many, many others. To see them all, go to the link above (https://land.nd.gov/minerals/mineralapps/lease/leasesearch.aspx) and then type in "153" and "93" for township and range. Note: when you get to that page, those leases have been over many years; only the two noted above were most recent.

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Captain Kangaroo and Mr Green Jeans

When I was growing up in Williston, we didn't have a television set until I must have been five or six years old, and then when we finally got a television set, we only got one station -- NBC.  And except for Romper Room (weekly, local) and Bonanza (Sunday nights) there wasn't much that interested me.

But every summer that we were able to travel all the way to Storm Lake, Iowa, where my maternal grandparents lived was wonderful. They had a television set and they got several stations ... well, at least two. The show I remember most during those early days was Captain Kangaroo. Loved it.

For whatever reason, when I saw the photo below, I immediately thought of that show (Captain Kangaroo was in fifty shades of grey, not color) but the photo below is what I imagine Captain Kangaroo would have looked like had it been in color.

The photo was part of a story in which Minnesota is going to spend a gazillion dollars in the name of safety by improving railroad crossings. It was noted that not one crude oil train had ever gone off the tracks at a rail crossing. The gazillions of dollars will be raised in part by an increase in the cost of Amtrak tickets.

By the way, can you imagine this? Threehundredtwentysixthousand (326,000) Minnesotans live near oil train tracks. Wow. "Oil train tracks." Also "grain tracks." And "ethanol tracks." And "Amtrak Tracks." LOL.

In an unrelated story, threehundredtwentysixthousand (326,000) Minnesotans would move to North Dakota if they could afford to.