The Bakken Is Changing -- August 23, 2015

This is "just for the fun of it."

Google decline rate Bakken : 190,000 results

• Bakken Decline Rates Worrying For Drillers, Oilprice.com, February, 2015
• The Coming Bust of the US Shale Oil & Gas Ponzi, Outsider Club, undated, 2015
• Oilfield Decline Rates, The View From The Mountain, undated
• Reverse Engineering the North Dakota Bakken Data, Peak Oil Barrel, February, 21, 2014
• Bakken Decline Rates Are Worrying For Drillers, Real Clear Energy, February 27, 2015
• The Most Exciting "Rumor" in the Bakken Oil Field, Daily Reckoning, January 9, 2014 (worthless; an ad for a newsletter)
• What is the average life of a shale oil well in the Bakken formation, Quora.com, April 7, 2013
• The Million Dollar Way: FAQ, August 23, 2015

Oh, that's cool. The Million Dollar Way, #8, front page, with a very generic google. Regular readers of the blog are much more sophisticated than the audiences that the first seven sites cater to.

Regular readers know my thoughts regarding the decline rates in the Bakken. I could care less what the decline rates are. If one invested $7 million in a well, and that well produced enough oil to pay back the investment in six (6) months, and then the EUR resulted in a $50 million overall revenue return over the next "x" number of years, I wouldn't care if the well dried up in one year or 50 years. Actually, I would prefer to get the full $50 million in less than ten years than wait for the well to slowly decline over 45 years.

The decline rates are a red herring, but everyone still talks about them. Mike Filloon was the first to crack the code: it's the a) payback time; and, b) the EUR that counts. And, of course, little things like the price of oil. $100 oil in 2017 is a heck of a lot better than $20 oil in 2015.

However, the reason I bring this up is because I spent the last eight (8) hours trying to find a graph previously posted on the blog, and I finally found it. So after spending eight (8) hours trying to find that graph I wasn't going to let it go by for naught.

The fact is that the IPs are changing, the payback times are changing, the decline rates are changing, and the EURs are changing.

Here's the graph.

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A Note to the Granddaughters

Wow, I'm in a good mood. I just got back in from swimming with our one-year-old granddaughter, I found the graphic I was looking for (see above), and I'm enjoying a new book, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, Nick Lane, c. 2015.

Algore is to global warming as Richard Dawkins is to evolution, or in mathematical notation:

Algore:Global Warming::Richard Dawkins:Evoulution.

For both Algore and Richard Dawkins, the science is established. There is no room for debate. There is no room for thoughtful discourse. The science is established. Those foolish enough to disagree are flat earthers or deniers.

The Vital Question is geared for those who have a sound background in biology, perhaps majored in biology in college. The comments over at Amazon.com support that opinion. Some parts of it are very, very hard going. It starts off simple enough but quickly gets very deep. It's the perfect book for a high school student between his/her junior/senior year who plans on majoring in biology in college. The book will bring folks up to where biology currently stands on the big issues.

This is how it starts, page 1, introduction, one paragraph in the book but I've broken it up:

There is a black hole in the heart of biology. Bluntly put, we do not know why life is the way it is.

All complex life on earth shares a common ancestor, a cell that arose from simple bacterial progenitors on just one occasion in 4 billion years. Was this a freak accident, or did other 'experiments' in the evolution of complexity fail? We don't know.

We do know that this common ancestor was already a very complex cell. It had more or less the same sophistication as one of your cells, and it passed this great complexity on not just to you and me but to all its descendants, from trees to bees. I challenge you to look at one of your own cells down a microscope and distinguish it from the cells of a mushroom. They are practically identical. I don't live much like a mushroom, so why are my cells so similar? It's not just that they look alike. All complex life shares an astonishing catalogue of elaborate traits, from sex to cell suicide to senescence, none of which is seen in a comparable form in bacteria.

There is no agreement about why so many unique traits accumulated in that single ancestor, or why none of them shows any sign of evolving independently in bacteria. Why, if all of these traits arose by natural selection, in which each step offers some small advantage, did equivalent traits not arise on other occasions in various bacterial groups?

Richard Dawkins would answer that with a "Rudyard Kipling just-so" response, no doubt.

The black hole is that "space" between bacteria and eukaryocytes. I've never seen Richard Dawkins address the biologic black hole. I'm a huge fan of Stephen Jay Gould -- I think I have every book he wrote and have read all but one of them; the one I haven't read is so thick and so difficult, I can only read it in bits and pieces -- but upon reflection, he never addressed the biologic black hole either.
The author implies that his book is the first to address this subject. That's probably a bit of hyperbole, but if it isn't the first, it certainly is among the few.