Random Update Frack Sand Pricing -- February 22, 2017

Cost Of Frack Sand Rising Faster Than Forecast -- Goldman Sachs

John Kemp via Twitter

• anecdotal 
• currently $30 - $40 / ton frack sand
• frack sand market "tightening more quickly than we [Goldman Sachs] previously envisaged
• partly due to winter-seasonally closed wet plants in Wisconsin/Illinois
• tightness may ease in spring (March/April) when wet plants restart
• spot prices now $30 - $40 / ton; higher than prior forecast of $25 / ton; up from only $20 / ton 4Q16
• supply of fine grade sand (100 mesh, 40 x 70) is particularly tight
• prior estimate: a peak price of $35 / ton; now Goldman Sachs "sees upside risk to our estimates"
• frack sand companies followed by GS: SLCA, EMES, FMSA/SND

Back-of-envelope:

• typical Bakken well: 4 million lbs on low side; 10 million lbs on high side
• 2,000 to 5,000 tons
• x $35 = $175,000 in frack sand per 10-million-lb well

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Wyoming Geology

Annals of the Former World

John McPhee

c. 1998

DDS: 557.3 MCP 

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Book 3: Rising From The Plain, p. 281 - p. 427

• Rawlins, Wyoming, I-80, at the Continental Divide
• autochthonous geologist: "one who studies rock that has not moved"
• Cretaceous: many fathoms underwater; the Stable Interior Craton -- from the Gulf of  Mexico to the Arctic Ocean; Cretaceous  -- hundred million years ago; oldest formation where oil could be found
• coastal swamps would have been like the Florida Everglades, the peat fens of East Anglia (where we were stationed with the USAF for three years), or the borders of the Java Sea
• Cretaceous swamps were particularly abundant in this part of Wyoming
• now, filled with coal
• alternating with the shale, was limestone, sea-bottom lime
• Creataceous stratovolcanoes (Idaho) spewed ash with selenium
• most plants ignore selenium
• exception: wood asters require selenium to germinate; once they take selenium up, they convert it to a form that nearly all plants will, in turn, take up
• selenium-contaminated plants are eaten by sheep and cattle
• concentrated selenium destroys an enzyme that transmits messages from brains to muscle: blind staggers -- seen in cattle and sheep; humans can also be poisoned by selenium
• Frontier Sandstone: one of the great oil sands in the Rocky Mountain region
• Mowry shale: organic mud of the Cretaceous seafloor; wherein the oil of the Frontier could have formed
• bentonite: AKA mineral soap; can adsorb water up to fifteen times its own volume; known as gumbo
• bentonite: sold worldwide; used in adhesives, automobile polish, detergent, and paint
• bentonite: in drilling "mud" of oil rigs, sent down the pipe and through apertures int he bit to carry rock chips to the surface; it sticks to the walls of the drill hole and keeps out unwanted water
• bentonite: Indians drove buffalo into swamps full of bentonite

1905, Rawlins, Miss Ethel Waxham, graduate of Wellesley College, Massachusetts; her field, classical studies; expert horse rider

Lost Soldier, WY: oil discovered in 1916

• it would yield the highest recovery per acre of any oil field that has ever been discovered in the Rocky Mountains
• payzones: 
• Cambrian Flathead sandstone
• Mississippian Madison limestone
• Tensleep sands of Pennsyvanian time
• Chugwater, red sands of the Triassic
• Morrison, Sundance, Nugget (celebrated formations of the Jurassic)
• Cretaceous Frontier
• discoverer: young graduate from Princeton University; put the term "sheepherder anticline" in the geologic lexicon: a "sheepherder anticline" is a particularly obvious anticline; to avoid being seen mapping such an anticline, a smart Princeton geologist would masquerade as a sheepherder

The outcrop around Rawlins: a greater spread of time than any other suite of exposed rocks along I-80 between NYC and SF; and a good deal more time than one sees in the walls of the Grand Canyon, where the clock stop stops at the rimrock, aged 250 million years

• at Rawlins: back into the Archean Eon and up to the Miocene epoch, 2,600 million years old
• when forming, it would have been near the equator
• the dunes would have been just under, or just rising above the water
• the dunes above water would have been much like the Libyan desert
• long discussion on the Rawlins Uplist -- so much of the earth's history had happened to be here; no one knows why
• Wyoming has a disproportionate percentage of American geology 
• shield rock: Precambrian craton; copper, diamonds, iron, and gold
• long discussion on Wyoming geologists; perhaps the best in the country
• mentions Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) -- p. 304
• Pine Bluffs: along the Wyoming-Nebraska state line; I've traveled through that area often on my trips back and forth between Texas and North Dakota
• Jackson Hole, p. 366; "hole" was a term used by the earliest whites to describe any valley that was closely framed by very high mountains; the story of David Jackson; ran trap-lines in the 1820s

This is all I will do on Book 3: just too much stuff. This would be a great beach book.