From The Wall Street Journal Today -- The Bakken -- June 8, 2016

Updates

Later, 8:26 p.m. Central Time: a new non-operated E&P company -- a new vulture -- W Energy Partners -- circling over the Bakken.
  

Original Post

 

The epicenter of America's oil bust is drawing buyers. Link here.

The vultures are descending on North Dakota.

Investors hoping for a bargain are buying up oil and gas wells from cash-strapped operators in the state’s Bakken Shale, a bet they will eventually be able to profit off one of the country’s hardest-hit oil plays. Hundreds of wells have changed hands or are in the process of being sold, state figures show, to a grab bag of fortune seekers ranging from industry experts to first-time wildcatters. They are picking up properties as more established producers scale back or shed assets to pay creditors.

Houston-based Lime Rock Resources, founded by a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker and an oil-industry veteran, bought more than 340 North Dakota wells from Occidental Petroleum Corp. in November. The firm says it has at least $1.6 billion in private-equity money to invest, a portion of which it has spent on the Bakken.

In another pairing of Wall Street and oil-patch veterans, NP Resources LLC bought 53 wells from Whiting Petroleum Corp. in December and is looking for more Bakken acreage.

These stories have been previously reported on the blog, see sidebar at the right. For example: NP/Whiting was posted here. Much more at the linked WSJ article.

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Solar Energy? No, It's LED Energy

This is really quite interesting. From The Wall Street Journal today:

Inside the cavernous interior of a former Boston-area taxi depot—walls covered in graffiti, pools of water on the concrete floors—three gleaming green-and-white containers sit side by side. The steel boxes are former “reefers”—refrigerated shipping containers used to transport cold goods. Bone-chilling rain is falling outside, but inside the 320-square-foot boxes, it’s a relatively balmy 63 degrees, and the humid air is heavy with the earthy smell of greens. Filling each box are 256 neat vertical towers of plants, bathed in a noonday-intense pink light.

The crops being cultivated here—lettuce, herbs and other leafy greens—are not what we’ve come to expect from this kind of operation. But the company behind this agricultural innovation owes a large debt to America’s pot farmers. Freight Farms was founded in 2010, its existence predicated on a bet that LEDs would soon become efficient enough for farming as if the sun had disappeared—without breaking the bank. Co-founder Brad McNamara puts it this way: “Traditional research said, yeah, LEDs are good, but the more important research was that they were improving at a Moore’s-Law rate.” Moore’s Law, used to describe the exponential increase in computing power over the past 50 years, can be applied to LEDs thanks in part to the needs—and considerable resources—of marijuana growers.

In addition to 128 LED strips, each “farm” has a water circulation system, 8 gallon-size tanks of liquid fertilizer and a propane tank for producing supplemental CO2—all running on as little as 10 gallons of water and 80 kWh of energy per day. Under the right conditions, a grower can go from seeds to sellable produce within six weeks. According to data pooled by the company, an average Freight Farms box can produce 48,568 marketable mini-heads of lettuce a year—the growing power of two acres of farmland.

Freight Farms is part of a rapidly expanding field: Food and agricultural technology startups received $4.6 billion in investment in 2015, almost double the $2.36 billion that poured into the sector in 2014, according to a report from agriculture investment platform AgFunder. Companies like John Deere and Monsanto have long invested in new technology for conventional farming, but we’re now seeing a disruption of farming itself.

There are more than 60 Freight Farms containers installed in 22 states and two Canadian provinces, in climates ranging from the long winters of Ontario to the sweltering heat of Texas. In a development that surprised even the company’s founders, the containers are increasingly making their way onto traditional farms for supplemental income outside the growing season. But most are parked in the interstitial spaces of cities, from warehouses and underneath highway overpasses to alleyways behind the restaurants where their crops are served. The result is hyperlocal produce, which sometimes travels just a few feet from farm to table.

Later: I may have to link this website in the sidebar at the right -- not! With regard to CO2:

Plants use CO2 for growth. It is the essential building block for photosynthesis (along with light and water). Plants cannot grow without CO2. The current levels in the atmosphere are about 350 parts per million (PPM). It is theorized that millions of years ago, levels of CO2 were about 1,500 PPM. Throughout the years, plants have evolved in many ways-and in many ways have stayed the same. Knowing this can be advantageous for us all.

It seems that plants have not lost the ability to use up to 1,500 PPM of CO2. Plant growth can be accelerated by increasing the CO2 levels in your growing area.

Conversely, CO2 levels below 250 PPM have a detrimental effect on your plants. If you have six plants growing in your closet, and there is no ventilation, your plants can use the CO2 in a few hours. They then stop growing. You must, at a minimum, provide fresh air for your plants every hour or so. An even better way is to provide supplemental CO2 for your plants by using either a CO2 generator or bottled CO2. Any of these solutions will keep your plants growing at optimal rates.

It has been proven that you can increase your growth rates by up to 20 percent and size by up to 30 percent by providing supplemental CO2 at levels over 1,200 PPM. You should never go over 1,500 PPM, as this soon becomes toxic for the plants, and they tend to grow very stringy. 

I'm glad "they" explained that -- how plants "use" CO2, unlike humans who exhale CO2. There's probably a lot of folks using marijuana that did not know that.