Sunday, March 5, 2017

Active rigs:

	3/5/2017	03/05/2016	03/05/2015	03/05/2014	03/05/2013
Active Rigs	45	35	113	192	186

North American upstream spending to soar in 2017. Headline story in Oil & Gas Journal via Twitter. From an earlier OGJ article:

• global upstream spending is expected to increase 7% in 2017 
• but, in North America: upstream spending will soar by 27%
• by itself, 27% is pretty impressive, but this comes after a decline of almost 40% in 2016
• offshore spending is poised to fall another 20 - 25% in 2017, after falling 34% in 2016
• offshore well spending represents 15% of total spending

For newbies, this EIA white paper on trends in US oil and natural gas upstream costs, published in March, 2016, might be of interest. The link will take you to a 141-page PDF.

That report is filled with incredibly good information and is a must-read. On page 7, for example, the last two paragraphs discuss the relative cost of Bakken wells compared to the other major plays. On page 4, the report notes the high cost of resin-coated proppants commonly used in the Bakken. The report is dated March, 2016, so the data was probably based on calendar year 2015 data, and in the late Bakken boom (2013 - 2014) there was a lot of discussion in the Bakken whether sand or ceramic was better. I could be wrong, but it seems that Bakken operators, in 2016 and 2017 are gravitating toward sand.

******************************

Update On DAPL Clean-Up

Corps cleans up one camp, two to go, from The Bismarck Tribune. 

Main camp: 2,000 cubic yards of "material"; 600 roll-off dumpsters .

From the article:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finished cleaning up the main Dakota Access Pipeline protest camp at the end of day Thursday, a full week after moving in with its contractors.

The Oceti Sakowin camp was the largest of three occupied camps on corps’-owned land along the Cannonball River in southern Morton County. All three sprung up in opposition to the nearby Dakota Access crude oil crossing under the Missouri River/Lake Oahe.

Corps’ spokesman Capt. Ryan Hignight said the final tally of debris removed from the camp by all contractors was just over 2,000 cubic yards of material requiring more than 600 roll-off dumpsters.

Much more at the link.