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The Oil Sheiks of the Dakota's

From what I was hearing I thought it was going to take a bunch of water to move the oil out of the fractured shale.
If this was an easy deal they would already be pumping.
 
mwj said:
From what I was hearing I thought it was going to take a bunch of water to move the oil out of the fractured shale.
If this was an easy deal they would already be pumping.
Click to expand...

They are drilling and they are pumping...The major problem with that area is the same as it has been for years with the Williston Basin- no cheap easy way to transport the oil- and lack of sufficient nearby refineries...One of the main reasons many of the Williston Basin wells were shut down was that all the pipeline space to transport the crude to the major refineries was committed/contracted to the companies bringing in Canadian oil...
 
OT are you saying this is all easy pump oil or are they skimming the gravy off first?
With that big of a reserve transport would not be a prob. if it is low cost production.
 
mwj said:
OT are you saying this is all easy pump oil or are they skimming the gravy off first?
With that big of a reserve transport would not be a prob. if it is low cost production.
Click to expand...

No its not all easy pump-- what I'm saying is its a couple thousand miles from the pumping site to where most the major refineries are in the gulf coast....And when that transport cost is added in- the costs become prohibitive...The local small refineries can't handle what can be produced- and the pipeline system is already full of contracted oil from Canada...
The new oil pipeline being planned thru here now will help take care of some of that problem- but that is years down the line before completion....

There are also a couple of rumored refineries being planned in the local area- but I think that is all on hold until a Long Term Energy Plan is developed so they know which way to go with building them...
 
October 23, Associated Press – (North Dakota) Storage tanks at Bakken Wells emitting natural gas. Companies tapping the rich Bakken shale and the formation below it in western North Dakota have reported excessive natural gas emissions from oil storage tanks and are working to burn or capture it, state and industry officials say.

The finding was surprising, and officials said it was unique to the Bakken formation, though they were not sure why. "We haven't measured any affect on North Dakota's air quality from it," said the director of the state Department of Mineral Resources. "I think it's a fairly easy problem to solve." A manager of permitting and compliance for the state Health Department, said oil companies notified state and federal regulators in May that untreated natural gas was being discharged from oil storage tanks at some well sites.

The gas is a byproduct of the oil production process and is unique to high-quality crude from the Bakken shale and the Three Forks-Sanish formation directly below it, he said. North Dakota's oil patch has nearly 4,550 producing oil wells, including 1,700 Bakken wells and about 200 wells aimed at the Three Forks-Sanish formation below the Bakken, he said. Machines called "heater-treaters" are used at well sites to remove gas and water from crude to improve its quality. It was at the storage tanks for processed oil that companies detected the leaking gas. State and federal regulators have tested dozens of Bakken wells, measuring the release of hydrocarbons.

Rules also are being crafted to monitor air quality at the well sites. The operations manager for Whiting Petroleum Corp's already has retrofitted its oil storage tanks to capture or flare the raw natural gas for the Bakken oil storage tanks. "We will capture it 99 percent of the time," he said. The state Health Department, hopes most companies will capture and sell the natural gas instead of flaring it. It would cost between $15,000 to $50,000 to upgrade a storage tank to burn or capture the natural gas. Source: http://cbs4denver.com/local/Storage.tanks.at.2.1267527.html
 
PORKER said:
October 23, Associated Press – (North Dakota) Storage tanks at Bakken Wells emitting natural gas. Companies tapping the rich Bakken shale and the formation below it in western North Dakota have reported excessive natural gas emissions from oil storage tanks and are working to burn or capture it, state and industry officials say.

The finding was surprising, and officials said it was unique to the Bakken formation, though they were not sure why. "We haven't measured any affect on North Dakota's air quality from it," said the director of the state Department of Mineral Resources. "I think it's a fairly easy problem to solve." A manager of permitting and compliance for the state Health Department, said oil companies notified state and federal regulators in May that untreated natural gas was being discharged from oil storage tanks at some well sites.

The gas is a byproduct of the oil production process and is unique to high-quality crude from the Bakken shale and the Three Forks-Sanish formation directly below it, he said. North Dakota's oil patch has nearly 4,550 producing oil wells, including 1,700 Bakken wells and about 200 wells aimed at the Three Forks-Sanish formation below the Bakken, he said. Machines called "heater-treaters" are used at well sites to remove gas and water from crude to improve its quality. It was at the storage tanks for processed oil that companies detected the leaking gas. State and federal regulators have tested dozens of Bakken wells, measuring the release of hydrocarbons.

Rules also are being crafted to monitor air quality at the well sites. The operations manager for Whiting Petroleum Corp's already has retrofitted its oil storage tanks to capture or flare the raw natural gas for the Bakken oil storage tanks. "We will capture it 99 percent of the time," he said. The state Health Department, hopes most companies will capture and sell the natural gas instead of flaring it. It would cost between $15,000 to $50,000 to upgrade a storage tank to burn or capture the natural gas. Source: http://cbs4denver.com/local/Storage.tanks.at.2.1267527.html
Click to expand...

Methane (which is most of natural gas) is not unique to oil deposits. It would have been nice for the writer to say how much natural gas is emitted.

Tex
 
3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Technically Recoverable Oil Assessed in North Dakota and Montana's Bakken Formation—25 Times More Than 1995

Contact Information:
U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey
Office of Communication
119 National Center
Reston, VA 20192 Main Contact
Phone: N/A



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Read FAQs about the Bakken Formation.
Listen to a podcast with the lead scientist on this topic.
Reston, VA - North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.

A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency's 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil.



3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Oil in North Dakota and Montana



Technically recoverable oil resources are those producible using currently available technology and industry practices. USGS is the only provider of publicly available estimates of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas resources.

New geologic models applied to the Bakken Formation, advances in drilling and production technologies, and recent oil discoveries have resulted in these substantially larger technically recoverable oil volumes. About 105 million barrels of oil were produced from the Bakken Formation by the end of 2007.

The USGS Bakken study was undertaken as part of a nationwide project assessing domestic petroleum basins using standardized methodology and protocol as required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 2000.

The Bakken Formation estimate is larger than all other current USGS oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest "continuous" oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. A "continuous" oil accumulation means that the oil resource is dispersed throughout a geologic formation rather than existing as discrete, localized occurrences. The next largest "continuous" oil accumulation in the U.S. is in the Austin Chalk of Texas and Louisiana, with an undiscovered estimate of 1.0 billions of barrels of technically recoverable oil.

"It is clear that the Bakken formation contains a significant amount of oil - the question is how much of that oil is recoverable using today's technology?" said Senator Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota. "To get an answer to this important question, I requested that the U.S. Geological Survey complete this study, which will provide an up-to-date estimate on the amount of technically recoverable oil resources in the Bakken Shale formation."

The USGS estimate of 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil has a mean value of 3.65 billion barrels. Scientists conducted detailed studies in stratigraphy and structural geology and the modeling of petroleum geochemistry. They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates.

USGS worked with the North Dakota Geological Survey, a number of petroleum industry companies and independents, universities and other experts to develop a geological understanding of the Bakken Formation. These groups provided critical information and feedback on geological and engineering concepts important to building the geologic and production models used in the assessment.

Five continuous assessment units (AU) were identified and assessed in the Bakken Formation of North Dakota and Montana - the Elm Coulee-Billings Nose AU, the Central Basin-Poplar Dome AU, the Nesson-Little Knife Structural AU, the Eastern Expulsion Threshold AU, and the Northwest Expulsion Threshold AU.

At the time of the assessment, a limited number of wells have produced oil from three of the assessments units in Central Basin-Poplar Dome, Eastern Expulsion Threshold, and Northwest Expulsion Threshold.
The Elm Coulee oil field in Montana, discovered in 2000, has produced about 65 million barrels of the 105 million barrels of oil recovered from the Bakken Formation.

Results of the assessment can be found at http://energy.usgs.gov.

For a podcast interview with scientists about the Bakken Formation, listen to episode 38 of CoreCast at http://www.usgs.gov/corecast/.
 

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