Tracking Down An Obscure Link From 2008 -- February 18, 2019

Over at my "Data Links" page, I have this cryptic note, under, "History: Publications":

Incredible, obscure report, dated September, 2008: a must! (unfortunately this link is broken and I cannot find the article; for now, read this short note, dated February 13, 2008)

I may not have found that "incredibly, obscure note," but I certainly found enough other sources to suggest what I must have been referencing.

But first some disclaimers and some comments.

Disclaimer: I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken. If there is a continuum with Jane ("Bakken Oil Hype") Nielson to the left and Harold ("trillion-bbl reservoir") Hamm is to the right, I'm somewhat to the right of Harold Hamm. If anybody is as far to the right of Harold Hamm as I am, I would like to meet him. Or her. If it's a 'her," we'll need to meet with a third party in this #MeToo world. But I digress.

Disclaimer: do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here.

Disclaimer: I often see things that others don't (mirages, ghosts, doppelgangers).

Disclaimer: in a long note like this, there will be factual and typographical errors. 

Comment: this post is mostly for newbies and crazy people. And conspiracy theorists.

Comment: entrepreneurs and established billionaires don't keep building in the Bakken if they thought it was a dying field (see Art Berman, and many others).

Comment: a trillion-bbl reservoir. Also, this link at "Dakota Oil Jobs."

Let's start here. This link will download as a PDF. I've linked it the blog before. It is a letter from A"David J. Bardin" to the acting director of the US Geological Survey, back in February, 2006. A screenshot:

I do not know if Dr Patrick Leahy responded to Mr Jardin or if the USGS released the Leigh C. Price paper.

But now that I know what I'm looking for, we can google 400 billion recoverable barrels "North Dakota"

This might be the article (or one nearly like it that I found back in 2008 but had lost),

The Bakken Formation is almost inconceivably large. Every time it is analyzed for “recoverable” oil, the number expands. It is influenced not only by improved technology but by more accurate estimates of its size.

In April 2008, a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated it contained 3.6 billion barrels of oil. To put that into perspective, if North Dakota oil producers produced only a million barrels a day from here on out, it would take 3,600 days, or 10 years, to drain the field. But five years later the USGS took a look and raised its estimate to 7.4 billion barrels.

Now estimates from other sources are coming in at 24 billion, with one outlier estimating that the field which occupies about 200,000 square miles underlying Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba contains 400 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

The screenshot:

Again, the same language used in the earlier link (above): two hundred billion barrels of oil have been discovered in North Dakota (from 2008):

America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America's Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC's short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.

In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951.

The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel.

One can see the "story" is simply being copied and re-copied among many sites, but it begs the question: is there any truth to the 1999 USGS study; does it exist; was it ever released; was it misinterpreted?

I might come back to this, but I"m watching NASCAR's Daytona 500 with Sophia.