North Dakota Oil Production Defies Calls For A Decline -- Rigzone -- January 16, 2016

This is pretty cool. This was the top story at Rigzone yesterday, and the headline: North Dakota Oil Output Defies Calls For A Decline:

North Dakota's oil production once again defied expectations for a decline in November, even seeing a slight uptick for the second consecutive month, as unusually warm weather helped offset the deepening decline in fracking activity.

Production in the second-largest U.S. oil producing state rose by 5,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 1.18 million barrels, monthly data from the Department of Mineral Resources showed.

Last month, it also rose 5,000 bpd. Output in North Dakota's Bakken shale fields has generally outpaced expectations even as oil prices have plunged to about $30 a barrel this week from over $100 in mid-2014.

Despite repeated forecasts for a decline, even from the U.S. government itself, output has remained surprisingly resilient. Last October, the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecast that Bakken output would slide by 23,000 bpd to 1.16 million bpd.

"Looking at the weather, we had relatively few days where there was too much wind and (there was) no precipitation in November. It was a very dry month, and it was not a cold month," Lynn Helms, director of the state's Department of Mineral Resources, told reporters on a conference call on Friday. 

Ah, yes, global warming: nice weather explains the production curve in North Dakota. Lynn Helms is the perfect commissioner for North Dakota: quiet, unassuming, taciturn, reserved. He easily could have pointed out that the real reasons North Dakota has maintained its production (so far) is due to some of the following factors:

• ISIS cells in western North Dakota have been pretty much shut down; kudos to the overworked police department responding to fights at the stripper clubs
• Turkish Kurds sabotaging pipelines into Johnson Corner have never been (much of) a problem
• Libyan revolutionaries have had minimal success taking out pipelines going into Hess' Tioga plant
• the Port of North Dakota has not seen any Teamster strikes in quite some time
• earthquakes did not shut down any North Dakota operations this past summer
• tornado alley is well south of North Dakota
• the hurricane season is relatively short in the entire Bakken region
• the state has pretty much secured the northern border without having to resort to a "wall"

We're not hearing much from Peak Oil folks any more. By the way, I was firmly in that group of "Peak Oil" folks prior to the Bakken.

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Geico Rock Award: Best In Show 2012

We Can't Drill Our Way to Lower Gas Prices -- President Barack Obama with best advice money can buy:

one minute sixteen seconds of fathomless ignorance same guy who "believes" in global warming

• Presdident Washington: I won't run for re-election; the country does not need a king
• President Lincoln: so, you're the little lady that started this war
• President Truman: the buck stops here
• President Kennedy: to the moon and safely back before the decade is out
• President Nixon: certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman president, perhaps sooner (1972 -- 43 years ago)
• President Reagan: Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall
• President Obama: we can't drill our way to lower gas prices