Bakken Economy -- March 7, 2016

Catching up. Some of these articles are a bit dated; I am just now getting caught up on some of these.

From The Bismarck Tribune, a week or so ago:

BNSF Railway Co. will continue to invest in North Dakota in 2016, though at a reduced rate.

The company released a statement saying it plans to spend more than $100 million in North Dakota this year. About $326 million was spent on rail capacity improvement projects in 2015, and $506 million was spent on infrastructure in 2014.

BNSF invested more than $1.1 billion in North Dakota from 2012 to 2014.

Spending this year will be focused on maintenance projects rather than the additional capacity built to meet customer demand in prior years, according to a company statement. This will include replacing and upgrading rail, rail ties and ballast, as well as continued installation of centralized traffic control signaling projects near Dickinson and Jamestown.

Maintenance will be performed on more than 740 miles of track, including the replacement of about 55 miles of rail and 240,000 ties and signal upgrades.

From The Williston Wire, last week:

RDO Equipment Co. will celebrate a Customer Appreciation Open House at its new Williston location on Wednesday, March 16 from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. RDO Equipment opened its first store in Williston in 2009. In early 2016, construction was completed on the new location at 14057 49th St. NW. The new site offers more than 36,000 square feet, 12 service bays and a drive-through wash bay. The original location is now home to RDO Truck Center.

Set in the heart of downtown Williston, Renaissance on Main (ROM), located on the corner of 2nd and Main Street, is opening the door to the new city center. ROM offers elegant office space along with retail and residential space. Williston Economic Development Executive Director, Shawn Wenko states, "Not only is it a top quality commercial and residential complex; it's going to be a showcase piece for our downtown." The public is invited to get its first peek at this exciting new development, during an Open House on Thursday, March 17th from 2-5 p.m. 

Local restaurateur Jason Esperum has opened his second restaurant in Williston. Esperum's newest eatery is Quinn's Bar and Burgers located in the former Blaine's Auto Body Shop at 2406 2nd Ave. W. Quinn's features hand ground burgers in a 21 and over bar setting. In addition to Quinn's, Esperum owns Lucy Lu's Restaurant and Bar in Downtown Williston.

I am really going to miss this one; this should be fun: The Williston Area Chamber of Commerce and Murphy Motors are gearing up for the annual ShamRockin' the Bakken / Taste of Williston on Thursday, March 17 from 5:30-10 p.m. at the Grand Williston Hotel and Conference Center. The St. Patrick's Day Celebration will feature some of the area's tastiest food and beverages; live music from Whiskey Rebellion; plus much  more. Admission is $20 per person.

From Reuters, by-line, Grand Forks, ND:

In a basement lab of a North Dakota research center, Beth Kurz and an assistant are peering through a scanning electron microscope, studying samples from the state's vast Bakken shale oil formation. Kurz, a hydrogeologist, is part of a team, which looks at using carbon dioxide to coax more oil out of wells that have already been hydraulically fractured, or fracked, in the process of extracting oil from shale rocks.

"No one is sure just yet how this process can work in the Bakken," said Kurz. "We're hoping to crack that riddle."

The use of CO2 in fracking, for example, could cut production costs in North Dakota's largest oil-producing county by about 10 percent. That, according to Reuters calculations, would bring costs to around $24.30 per barrel, below current market prices.
So far, the process has worked in laboratory conditions, but not yet in field trials, so it is unclear how quickly it could be commercially deployed.

Hess Corp, North Dakota's third-largest oil producer, is studying how it can lengthen the horizontal wells and use cheaper materials in fracking.

Services giant Schlumberger NV, licensed a new process last fall that slashes the number of pumps needed to frack a well.

With regard to that last story, this from an article from the North Dakota Geological Survey:

Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects in North Dakota have met with varying degrees of success. Some failed to produce any incremental oil while others successfully increased recovery. Most of the unsuccessful EOR projects were attempts to waterflood Madison reservoirs in north-central North Dakota.

The failure of these waterfloods is inexplicable because waterfloods in the same strata in Canada have been successful. One explanation is that project operations were conducted differently while another explanation is that reservoir properties in North Dakota differ from similar reservoirs in Canada. Carbonate reservoirs are often inhomogeneous and only a thorough understanding of the reservoir characteristics and careful planning can compensate for these inhomogeneities.

The EOR projects attempted in North Dakota are listed in Table II [the table is missing from the article]. Each of the listed EOR projects has a unique identifying abbreviation that corresponds to those in figure 28, a location map of all the active units in North Dakota [Figure 28 is also missing from the article].

In 1983, Chevron Oil Co. attempted to unitize Little Knife Field to institute a CO₂ flood for pressure maintenance. A successful pilot study involving five wells had shown that the program would probably be successful (Desch et al., 1984), but the unitization attempt failed because the 80% of the royalty interest owners necessary to ratify a unitization agreement in North Dakota was not attained.

Recent CO₂ enhanced recovery programs in Canada have apparently been successful. These successful programs, coupled with the apparent success of the Chevron pilot program at Little Knife Field, might point to a future need for CO₂. There are two sources of CO₂ presently available to operators in the Williston Basin. The first source is the Wyoming Thrust Belt, where CO₂ is produced together with other natural gasses. The second source is the coal gasification project at Beulah, North Dakota where CO₂ is a byproduct of the process. A pipeline is being built to transport CO₂ to the Weyburn Field in Saskatchewan and startup of a CO₂ flood may begin during 1999. The pipeline's route takes it past many other fields that are suitable for CO₂ programs and perhaps some other fields will be CO₂-flooded soon.

From The Bakken, July 31, 2013:

The EERC team is also working to establish the best possible approach to enhanced oil recovery (EOR). For the past year, the team has been analyzing and working to test the use of CO2 injected into an oil well as a vehicle to mobilize previously trapped oil droplets, allowing for the recovery of more oil. Currently, oil recovered in the resource is roughly 3 to 5 percent. “If we can change 3 to 5 percent to 4 to 6 percent,” he says, that is very meaningful. “The denominator on this research is so huge that single type percent increases in recovery are extremely meaningful. A 1 percent increase of recoverable oil translates to roughly $150 billion of value.”

To find that value, EERC has started to analyze two unsuccessful Bakken EOR pilot projects: one in the Elm Coulee field of Montana and the other in Mountrail County of North Dakota. The team has arranged a data-sharing agreement that will help them better understand the efforts. According to Harju, the EERC team has developed some exciting tests that could help prove Bakken EOR by 2014. 

Other links:

• Basin Oriented Strategies for CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery, Williston Basin, 2006 -- excellent
• EOR, at energy.gov. 
• Wyoming State Office Reservoir Management Group, undated, probably about 2008.
• Saudi Aramco, 2010.