Top exporter Saudi Arabia kept output steady in September as reduced use of crude in domestic power plants was offset by a gentle uptick in exports towards the latter part of the month.
Saudi output remains close to the record high of 10.56 million bpd it pumped in June, as it focuses on market share. Riyadh has regained some market share in 2015, according to a Reuters analysis published on Wednesday.
A Wyoming judge on Wednesday granted a preliminary injunction against the federal government's regulations for hydraulic fracturing on public lands, handing a victory to oil and gas producers who had vehemently opposed the rules.
U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl had put the regulations on hold in June as he weighed a request from energy industry groups and four states to stop the rules from being implemented until their lawsuit against the new standards was resolved.
The rules issued by the Interior Department would require companies to provide data on chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and to take steps to prevent leakage from oil and gas wells on federally owned land.
The Independent Petroleum Association of America and the Western Energy Alliance were joined by Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota and Utah in seeking to stop the new rules from taking effect. In his order granting the injunction, Judge Skavdahl ruled that federal agencies' only have authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, when the use of diesel fuel is involved.I remember talking about this years ago, when I first started blogging, about the issue of diesel and the Clean Water Act. It's been a long time since this was brought up. I can't speak for Wyoming, but it's my understanding diesel is no longer used in North Dakota for fracking.
TransCanada Corp. is surrendering to an additional review of the Keystone XL oil pipeline and backing off from conflicts with Nebraska landowners as it struggles to win approval for the project.
Instead of waging court battles to cross privately owned land and trying to avoid a review by Nebraska’s Public Service Commission, TransCanada will withdraw lawsuits and seek approval from the regulator, the Calgary-based company said Tuesday. While that’s a development Keystone XL opponents had sought all along, the move promises to bring certainty to its route through the state, according to TransCanada.Hope springs eternal.
Somewhere amid the maze of wells that Murphy Oil Corp. has scattered across Texas’s sprawling Eagle Ford shale formation, Brett Pennington is carrying out a little experiment.
What will happen, the exploration chief wants to know, when he jams huge quantities of sand down the narrow mouth of one of these wells. Will more crude seep out? Or, rather, will he smother the opening and choke off the flow?
For the experiment, he’s amped up the sand meter all the way to 3,000 pounds per foot, almost double the average that each well in the Eagle Ford gets nowadays. If Pennington’s project seems a bit extreme, it also serves to underscore a trend spreading rapidly across a shale industry that’s scrambling to remain profitable after oil prices sank 50 percent. More and more sand is getting stuffed down wells to try to better pry open the rock and bolster output.
Some of this is just a cost phenomenon. In the wake of crude’s selloff, the sand market collapsed too, driving down the price 30 percent and making it cheaper to shovel more grit in. The initiative, though, began years earlier, the result of engineers tinkering with inputs and discovering one of the many little technological breakthroughs that have helped the shale industry weather the downturn better than their legions of skeptics predicted. For proof of greater productivity, look no further than total U.S. output: It remains within 3 percent of a 40-year high even though drillers have idled more than half of their rigs.
"I can’t control the price of the commodity," Pennington said in a recent interview. "The only thing we can do is get better and faster and cheaper. There’s a general correlation that more sand equates to a better well."
The increase in sand usage has been steady. Back in 2012, the average well in the Eagle Ford received less than 1,000 pounds for every foot that the opening snaked down into the ground, according to energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie Ltd. By 2013, that number was about 1,200 pounds. And last year it climbed to over 1,500 pounds. A study of more than 1,000 wells in the Eagle Ford -- a region that accounts for 15 percent of all U.S. oil output -- revealed that the injection of additional sand can triple output in some cases.
Sand, of course, has been used in the oil industry for decades. But the traditional vertical wells that dominated the landscape for much of that time needed little more than a sprinkling. The rock in those wells tends to be porous and permeable, allowing natural underground pressure to squeeze the oil up to the surface.
Shale rock is different. It’s more like concrete. Hydraulic fracking relies on large quantities of both sand and water to tease the oil out. The water is blasted into the well at high pressure to create tens of thousands of tiny cracks in the rock. The sand keeps the cracks open, elongates them and makes them more jagged. Increase the amount of sand and you increase the amount of fractures that stay open.
What Murphy Oil, EOG Resources Inc. and other shale drillers are trying to figure out is when does it become too much. At some point, all the fractures are propped open, and the extra sand just becomes a cost with no benefit. The Bloomberg Intelligence study indicated there are diminishing returns at the highest levels of sand use.
Worse yet, too much sand could wind up clogging the cracks instead of holding them open.Much more at the link.
| 9/30/2015 | 09/30/2014 | 09/30/2013 | 09/30/2012 | 09/30/2011 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active Rigs | 68 | 190 | 184 | 190 | 201 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 7-2015 | 11029 | 6740 |
| 6-2015 | 13714 | 9821 |
| 5-2015 | 15608 | 11533 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 7-2015 | 4207 | 55 |
| 6-2015 | 21205 | 17366 |
| 5-2015 | 12049 | 8973 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 7-2015 | 17752 | 0 |
| 6-2015 | 13932 | 11447 |
| 5-2015 | 15973 | 6638 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 7-2015 | 5837 | 0 |
| 6-2015 | 15954 | 9649 |
| 5-2015 | 19305 | 1647 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 7-2015 | 15656 | 0 |
| 6-2015 | 19297 | 15513 |
| 5-2015 | 27179 | 0 |
| 4-2015 | 10964 | 4474 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 7-2015 | 14246 | 20444 |
| 6-2015 | 14659 | 25056 |
| 5-2015 | 15001 | 23387 |
| 4-2015 | 1280 | 0 |