Three Wells Coming Off The Confidential List; RBN Energy On CO2-EOR -- August 6, 2020

Jobless claims, link here:

• forecast: 1.442 million
• actual: 1.186 million

MDU, link here:

• requests rate increase; average increase $3.35/month per household;
  
• also reaches agreement with PSC to retire two coal-fired power plants and build a new natural gas unit at Heskett Station north of Mandan
• earnings transcript, Seeking Alpha;
  

OPEC basket, link here: $45.34 (nice spike).

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$42.35	8/6/2020	08/06/2019	08/06/2018	08/06/2017	08/06/2016
Active Rigs	12	60	64	58	34

Wells coming off the confidential list -- Thursday, August 6, 2020: 14 for the month; 85 for the quarter, 531 for the year:

• 36984, drl/RTAI, CLR, LCU Truman Federal 4-23H, Long Creek,
• 36419, SI/A, Zavanna, Panther 16-21 4H, Stony Creek, t--; cum 108K 4 months; a 42K month; 
• 36160, conf, Hess, GO-Hauge-156-97-2116H-4, cum 80k;  a 28K month;

RBN Energy: the challenges facing COs-based enhanced oil recovery. Archived.

The collapse in crude oil prices this year hit U.S. producers hard, and forced them to make big cuts in their capital budgets and drilling plans. But it also helped to prove their resilience. Throughout the Shale Era, and especially since the 2014-15 oil price crash, producers have been increasing their productivity and slashing their production costs, enabling most of them to survive even when prices slipped below $30 and $20/bbl for a while. Not all producers are alike, however — neither is all production. Even with oil prices rebounding to about $40/bbl in recent weeks, production based on enhanced oil recovery (EOR) through carbon-dioxide (CO2) “flooding” has become economically challenged, at least for some producers. Can EOR, with its high production costs, survive in a low-price environment? Today, we take a fresh look at EOR in an era of $40/bbl crude.

Our younger readers may not remember, but not long ago U.S. crude oil production was on the decline — a number of conventional oil plays in the U.S. were viewed as being pretty much tapped out, and the U.S. was becoming increasingly dependent on imported crude. What grabbed all the headlines, of course, was the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, which in the past decade have freed amazing volumes of mostly light and super-light crude from shale and tight-oil plays like the Bakken, the Denver-Julesburg Basin, and — most important — the Permian. But even before the Shale Era started in earnest, there was a lot of hope that enhanced oil recovery would breathe new life into conventional production areas whose output had dwindled to a trickle.