Dore, North Dakota -- Between Trenton, North Dakota, and Fairview, Montana on Highway 58

I keep forgetting about Dore, North Dakota. I have posted notes about Dore a couple times and now it pops up again.

In my quest to learn more about proppants, "anonymous" sent me a link to Pioneer Oil LLC which has its own supply link to China for proppants. That will take you to my stand-along post; this will take you to Pioneer Oil/Proppant. When you get there, note where Pioneer has a proppant storage facility. You guessed it: Dore, North Dakota.

I drove through Dore this evening and did not realized it. Dore is on state highway 58 between Trenton, North Dakota, and Fairview, Montana. But there is no sign of Dore. Nothing. But, wow, was there a long line of oil tanker cars. Yup, Dore is also home to a crude-by-rail loading facility.

Someone last week accused me of being in a time warp when I mentioned that the stock market had gone below 11,000 -- and said that was the first time in "quite some time" that the market had dropped below 11,000. "Anonymous" pointed out that it was less than 30 days ago, and not all that long ago. I replied that things are happening so fast in the Bakken, it often feels like a time warp.

Indeed, the Williams County Commission has just announced a 6-month moratorium on man-camps, just to catch so the members can catch their breath.

Who would have ever guessed that Dore would rise again?

Department of Numbers: Another Interesting Site to Check Out

Link here.

I have it linked on the sidebar at the right, near the bottom.

Hey, Shovel-Ready Projects -- Natural Gas Pipelines

Link here.

Three of California's largest utilities are asking customers to help pay for nearly $4 billion in pipeline safety projects needed after last year's deadly San Bruno disaster.

Power companies and private operators across the nation are racing to improve the safety of about 150,000 miles of natural gas pipelines built before 1970 — about half of all gas transmission lines in the United States.

And increased utility costs to pay for more expensive and redundant wind power, and to some extent, solar power. 

For Investors: Another Bakken Metric -- Cash Margins on the Rise -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Link here.

Each month we update the Bakken Players piece for current events, repricing of the group versus cash flow estimates, and adding a few new graphs. In between we occasionally like to focus on sections of the larger piece. Last week we had brief comments on production growth per share and you can see that piece here. This week’s topic: unit costs and cash margins.

Note as usual that WLL and CLR are not pure Williston Basin plays but we include them since the Bakken and to a lessor the Three Forks are largely driving the fundamentals and the stories at present. As production rises the normal mode you want to see in your growthy E&P companies is rising absolute costs but flat or falling per unit costs with the passage of time. In unconventional resource plays we often experience this in two or three phases where you see rapid production growth lead to a decline in per unit production costs, followed by a bump up in per unit costs as firms bulk out their staff to handle the shift from delineation mode to development mode, followed by continued per unit cost declines. 

See also, an earlier Z-Man link (same as above).

Predicting Oil Prices

I haven't had a chance to read this article yet, but don't want to lose it.

This appears to be the bottom line, and something with which I agree:

But while the analysts at Goldman enjoy their success, a careful look at the whole range of price forecasts reveals worrying problems with the whole process. Forecasts appear to be backward-looking, and have little predictive power, even over quite short periods of time. Forecasts react to events rather than anticipate them, limiting their value to longer-term investors and hedgers.