A Reader Had Questions About CLR's Bakken FIU Wells -- November 8, 2025

Locator: 49373B.

I sent this in a separate e-mail earlier today to the reader who asked me the two questions, but then I got to thinking. 

Other folks may benefit from this note. It explains a lot. Again, there may be content and typographical errors. but when it comes to content, it's how I understand the Bakken and I could be wrong in some places. Note: a reader noted that I had "inverted" sections 6 and 7 in my explanation. I correct those errors below. Hopefully I caught them all. 

Note: a reader provided more information regarding the Catwalk (and probably other oil fields along the Missouri). Scroll down to see "update from a reader." 

It's simply how I see things.

With regard to the CLR Brakken FIU wells, a reader asks two questions:

1. On the 'North Dakota Industrial Commission Permits Approved' listing of the four new Brakken FIU wells, why does the legal description show McKenzie County instead of Williams County? 

2. And after each well, there is the wording "location outside of spacing unit". What does this mean? 

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My reply follows. This was done quickly and has not been proofread. There will be typographical and content errors, but will be corrected when found.

The answers to the two questions: 

The first question is easy to answer: like all Bakken shale wells, the Brakken FIU wells are horizontal laterals. The wells are sited in section 7 of T153N-R100W, just south of the river (a few miles east of Indian Hill) and thus sited in McKenzie County, and that's why their legal description is McKenzie County, not Williams County.

The wells are horizontal wells and the horizontal laterals run north (three sections long) and the bottom hole -- where the horizontal laterals end -- is in the CATWALK OIL FIELD, section 30  of T154N-R100W on the north side of the river, Williams County. 

The NDIC considers them Catwalk wells because the the majority of oil comes from Williams County (two townships in Williams County and only one township in McKenzie County. Again, Catwalk Oil Field is in Williams County. 

But the fact that the oil well pad where the wells are sited is in McKenzie County, their legal description is McKenzie County, not Williams County.

The spacing unit for these wells are three sections: section 6 of T153N-R100W and sections 30 and 31 of T154N-R100W. Anyone owning minerals in any of these sections will collect royalties from these wells.

Even though the well is sited in section 7, folks who own minerals in that section, section 6-153-100, will not receive royalties because the horizontals will not be collect oil from that section.

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The second question is also easy to answer but hard to put into writing. Bottom line is this: the well will be sited / will be drilled in section  7-153-100 but that section is "outside" of the spacing unit. The NDIC notes this because folks who read that this well is located in section  7-153-100, they might think they will get royalties from these wells. They won't because the well is located / sited outside the spacing unit.

The reason this works is because the operator drills the well to depth, about 9,000 feet, and then turns the vertical well into a horizontal well and turns the well north, in this case. Any part of the horizontal well in section 6 will not be perforated so the horizontal will not collect oil from section six.

The operator chose to drill the well outside the spacing unit, which is something operators could always do but now are doing it more often for geologic / economic reasons. In some cases, they have to drill outside the spacing unit because of surface conditions. That's why no wells are drilled in the Missouri River. They drill outside of the Missouri River and drill under the river, as they did here in the Brakken FIU wells.

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This map may help:

Update from a reader:

Regarding some of the units along this area of the Missouri River (Cat Walk, Last Chance, Willow Creek, Crazy Man and Long Creek) – many of the leases were federal leases involved in the high-water mark controversy. 

The Catwalk Unit was particularly challenging because the lease had been acquired in 2013 with an existing well drilled by Brigham in 2010. [Leases should have] been HBP (held by production) but the successor operators (Statoil/Equinor) challenged the previous surveys. With a new cadastral survey, many leaseholder positions were changed. 

Grayson acquired Equinor’s position a few years ago and we finally were able to square our ownership in the original Brakken well in Catwalk.  What was interesting was that the cadastral survey changed the makeup of the mineral ownership of the 1280 unit. The shift went from Devon’s newly acquired ownership and current operator, to CLR as the new majority owners of the unit. So, the original Brakken well is still operated by Devon however, the new well drilled with in the same unit will be CLR.  

Under NDIC hearing and orders, the original Brakken will mostly likely be P&A due to its angle in the previous 1280 unit. 

Pet Peeve Of The Day -- November 8, 2025

Locator: 49372PELOSI.

This is my pet peeve of the day:

This is being reported "everywhere" in conservative / MAGA / Trump-supporting media outlets.

I have no problem with Ms Pelosi's investment results. None whatsoever.

I would congratulate her on what she has accomplished. I can't recall anything that she and I would both agree upon. Having said that, she was probably "more" correct for the average American than I was but that's a different discussion for a different time.

But with regard to her investments: good for her.  

I'll provide a rationale for these comments later. But I'm doing more important things this evening -- like watching college football. LOL.

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A Little Nostalgia

This was truly revolutionary.

iBook: 1999 to 2006.

I still have my old iBook -- the original "Blueberry" iBook. What a treasure.  

It was released in 1999. I would have bought my Blueberry iBook in 1999 when we were still stationed at Langley AFB, Virginia, or in 2000, when we moved to San Antonio. The iconic iMac, the G3, a desktop, was released in 1998. I had it at our house in Langley so I would have bought it the year that it came out, and then bought the mobile iBook.

US Housing -- COTD

Locator: 49371HOUSING.

Link here. 

Chart of the day. 

Post-Covid angst had nothing to do with this.

The lockdown began March, 2020.

One year later, the US started to recover, March, 2021, and "fully" recovered by March, 2022.

In the graph above, interesting enough, 2022 was the year that the "green line" got back to pre-2020-numbers. 

Inflation:

• used cars
• rent

Waiting time in emergency room / acute care clinics at records.  

What's the connecting factoid? 

Googling the right question will give you the answer. One credible and highly respectable contributor over at x has done just that.

Find Me App On Apple -- November 7, 2025

Locator: 49370APPLE.

Gen Zers are addicted to "location sharing." 

Link here. 

Surveillance has become our default mode. You know you’re in a deep, committed relationship when someone pops the big question: share your location? My boyfriend and I share ours on Snapchat, and I’m not even really sure why. It could be because TikTok convinced us it’s what serious couples do—#relationshiprules posts frequently list location sharing as non-negotiable.

This habit didn’t come out of nowhere. On Foursquare, an app popular in the mid-2010s, users could tag themselves at specific locations. And people have casually tagged locations on Instagram for years—a bar, a restaurant or a beach halfway around the world. This is meant to brag about status, or to connect through shared places. Eventually, it became normal, even comforting, to be findable. Sharing our locations in real time, 24/7, just feels like the next step.

The first time location sharing entered my life was in 2017, when Snapchat launched its Snap Map, and users turned on their locations to allow dozens or hundreds of their connections to pinpoint where they were. If I went on Snap Maps right now, I would see hundreds of avatars spread over a global map. I’m lucky that my parents taught me about digital safety from a young age—I never shared my location publicly. But plenty of my peers did; as of 2022, 250 million users were using Snap Map each month.

Recent tools are more precise. Apple’s Find My Phone shows a user’s location down to the address. The user doesn’t need to have their app open—only their phone turned on. On Instagram’s recent location-sharing feature, meanwhile, users can show where they are through the app’s messaging tab.

Many of my friends treat location-tracking as entertainment. We openly stalk our friends’ dots on maps and joke about watching their “sims” move around. One person in my friend group is chronically late and, more than once, a group of us have been sitting in a bar waiting for her—only to check our maps, see she’s still at home and give her a call to tell her to get going. It only hit me later how invasive it was to do that without even thinking. Gone are the days when you could type “on the way” while still in bed, or flake with a vague excuse. Once, a friend texted me while I was out with my parents: “Are you at Starbucks? Sorry I was checking your location.” Another friend once texted, “Why are you at the mall?” (Look, sometimes I don’t want to admit that this is my fifth trip to Aritzia this week.)

What is most remarkable to me is that this surveillance doesn’t bother most of my friends. Many of us do it without considering why. I asked one of my friends who chronically checks locations why she does it, and she gave a few answers: tracking the progress of a bus her friend is on, or seeing if people she doesn’t like are at the same bar. The main reason: “I love knowing where my friends are!”

Much more at the link.

It seems a natural fit would be "Facebook" (Meta) and a "Find Me" app. Apparently "Meta/Facebook" has something along this line. I haven't seen it so I wouldn't know.

Officials Now Approve A Williams Natural Gas Pipeline Into NYC And Long Island -- Friday, November 7, 2025

Locator: 49369PIPELINE.

Before you begin reading this story, there may be a bigger story here. Does this "turn-of-events" put the Keystone XL back into play. The Canadians really, really would like that pipeline, and the refiners in Texas would really like that heavy oil.

But that's later. Here's the big story breaking in the past few days. 

This story is now being posted in the mainstream media (one link here).

The story was first posted on the blog on October 29, 2025, but archived under the new blog format, and I assume more readers missed it.

Here's the beginning of the RBN Energy article:

Link here.

This past spring — 10 years after Williams Cos. first proposed the Northeast Supply Enhancement Project (NESE) and one year after it scrapped plans for it — the effort to add 400 MMcf/d of natural gas pipeline capacity into New York City and Long Island was revived, thanks largely to a changing political climate in Washington, DC. Since then, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has re-approved the project and regulators in New York and New Jersey have been mulling over whether to issue water-quality permits for the $1-billion-plus plan. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss Williams’s renewed push to get NESE permitted and built — and the uncertainty still ahead.

As we said in Fight Song, it took nine years, an act of Congress and a Supreme Court ruling — yes, really! — for the developers of Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to take their 303-mile, 2-Bcf/d project from announcement to startup. Well, Williams’s plan to build NESE was, like the plan by EQT Midstream Partners and other developers of MVP, first unveiled way back in 2015, but unlike MVP it still isn’t up and running. Williams was successful in securing a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity (CPCN) for the project from FERC in 2019. However, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) both rejected the midstreamer’s applications for Water Quality Certification under Section 401 of the federal Clean Water Act, citing (among other things) concern about the project’s impact on aquatic resources. Williams appealed those denials but walked away from it all in April 2024 when FERC’s CPCN was about to expire. 

Fast-forward to March of this year when, just before a planned White House meeting with New York Governor Kathy Hochul, President Trump tweeted that he would no longer allow New York to block important infrastructure projects like NESE and the Constitution Pipeline project in upstate New York, adding, “We will use federal approval!” In April, the Trump administration put more pressure on Hochul by issuing a stop-work order on the massive Empire Wind project off Long Island, which was fully permitted and under construction. But that move was rescinded in May when the governor promised that state agencies would give pipelines and other fossil-fuel-related projects a fair hearing.

Williams announced soon thereafter that it had decided to revive the left-for-dead NESE project with new applications to FERC, DEC and DEP. At the same time, Williams said it would pursue a possible revival of the 125-mile, 650-MMcf/d Constitution Pipeline in upstate New York, but only if Northeastern governors invited it “with the red carpet rolled out,” in the words of Williams’s then-CEO (and now executive chairman) Alan Armstrong. [The Constitution project, which was approved by FERC in 2014 but denied a New York water-quality permit in 2016 and effectively canceled in 2020, would run from northeastern Pennsylvania to west of Albany, NY, where it would tie into the Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) and Iroquois Pipeline systems to bring gas east and south to Massachusetts, Connecticut and Long Island. More on Constitution in a moment.]

Before we delve further into NESE’s current status and prospects, we should describe what the project involves. First of all, it would be the latest in a series of enhancements that Williams has been making to its 10,000-mile-plus Transco system, which runs between South Texas and New York City. We’ve blogged extensively the past couple of years about Williams’s ongoing efforts to increase southbound capacity on Transco between New Jersey and the Southeast — see our recent Don’t Stop Believin’ for more — but the company had previously made a number of improvements to the uppermost reaches of the Transco system that feed the Big Apple.

For example, back in 2013, Williams completed its Northeast Supply Link project, adding 250 MMcf/d of eastbound capacity on Transco’s mainline and Leidy systems. That project included 12 miles of 42-inch-diameter pipeline in new loops, or parallel lines, in Pennsylvania’s Lycoming and Monroe counties and in Hunterdon County, NJ, as well as 26 miles of pipeline upgrades and new or upgraded compression stations. Over the next four years, Williams also completed its Rockaway Delivery Lateral, Northeast Connector and New York Bay Expansion projects, each of which enabled more Marcellus-sourced gas to flow into New York City.

Figure 1. Williams’s Northeast Supply Enhancement Project. Source: Williams

The NESE project would give the region’s gas grid another boost. As in the original plan several years ago, the recently revived project would involve installing 10 miles of 42-inch-diameter pipeline looping (parallel piping) along Transco in Lancaster County, PA (red line labeled #1 to lower-left in Figure 1 above); a 3.4-mile, 26-inch-diameter onshore loop of the Lower New York Bay Lateral (LNYBL) in Middlesex County, NJ (red line labeled #2 within small box in upper-right and in inset map); and a 23-mile, 26-inch offshore loop of LNYBL itself (red line labeled #3 in upper-right and in inset map). That last segment would run to the offshore Rockaway Transfer Point, an existing interconnection between the LNYBL (long blue line under New York Harbor) and the Rockaway Delivery Lateral (short blue line from eastern end of #3 to long, narrow Rockaway Peninsula). The Rockaway lateral connects to National Grid’s distribution system in Brooklyn.

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The Abbreviated Version From MSN

Same link as above.

A proposal to pipe natural gas underwater into New York City won approval for water permits from state regulators on Friday, reversing prior decisions that had said the pipeline was too dangerous to health and marine life.

The ruling is a win for Williams Co, the Tulsa-based company behind the project, which is known as the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline. Its stock was up 1.5% on Friday as the company is closer to its goal of unlocking more natural gas supplies to the Northeast. “We’re proud to move NESE forward and do our part in providing New Yorkers access to clean, reliable and affordable natural gas,” said Chad Zamarin, president and CEO of Williams, in a statement. Natural gas is used for heating and electricity generation.

The approval also appears to be a sign that some Democratic-controlled states are changing their stance on the impact of new fossil fuel infrastructure. The decision was made by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), part of the executive branch under Gov. Kathy Hochul. Just five years ago, the same agency—then under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo—had denied the permit, citing the likelihood that it would dredge up toxic material. It was also denied another time before that. “There is no legal or scientific basis for taking a 180-degree turn from the state’s past denials,” said Mark Izeman, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If built, the pipeline would tear up 23 miles of miles of the New York-New Jersey Harbor floor; destroy marine habitats; and dredge up mercury, copper, PCBs and other toxins.”