Move over Saudi Arabia and Alberta; North Dakota has world's largest oil field.

[Winston]

North Dakota has world's largest oil field.

Good on 'em.

But still,

[Asher]

Please re-create this thread when you learn how to link.

Best of all, the Bakken could be huge. The U.S. Geological Survey's Leigh Price, a Denver geochemist who died of a heart attack in 2000, estimated that the Bakken might hold a whopping 413 billion barrels. If so, it would dwarf Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, the world's biggest field, which has produced about 55 billion barrels.

So this figure is from one dead guy's estimate from 8 years ago?

Please.

[Dinner]

Word of Mouth

Johnson and two partners, land man Henry Gordon and geologist Robert Berry, leased about 38,000 acres in the area and shopped the mineral rights around. EOG bought 75 percent across all of the acres. In April 2006, EOG started drilling near a stream called Shell Creek. Workers drilled down some 9,000 feet and then started angling into the Bakken. They hit natural gas and crude.

Oil companies try to keep discoveries quiet so they can snap up more leases around them. Information travels fast in the Williston, though, where all of the roughnecks and rig operators know one another. Reger and Gilbertson had just formed Northern Oil when they got word from a lawyer in Montana that EOG had hit a big one. Reger sent his brother J.R. to lease as much land as he could, as close as he could, to EOG.

Pathfinder

In April, Reger took his busload of hedge fund managers to a well called Pathfinder being drilled by Slawson Exploration Co. out of Wichita, Kansas. Northern owns only 3 percent of Pathfinder but has land all around it. Success here would almost certainly mean more drilling in adjacent sections.

``From this location, we are literally masters of all we survey,'' Reger says.

The drill had hit the Bakken layer two weeks earlier, on Easter Sunday, producing a burst of natural gas. Where there's gas, there's often oil. As the rig clanks and groans like a motorized Godzilla, the hedge fund managers gather inside the trailer and crowd around the desk of Jon Starkweather, a ``mud logger'' who analyzes the rock chips coming up the hole. His window is covered with long charts that look like electrocardiograms.

``We landed this one just right,'' the bearded Starkweather says. Recent gas ventings, called kicks, confirm it.

Even if Reger and Gilbertson stopped gathering more mineral leases, they would make a fortune on what they have already, Reger says.

``I could take a nap for two years under my desk and wake up a hero,'' he says.

Millionaires

Reger's 14 percent stake in Northern is worth about $49 million. Gilbertson has shares worth $24 million. Whiting Petroleum's shares have more than doubled in the past 12 months, triple the 34 percent gain for a group of 96 energy companies in the Russell 2000 Index.

The other people doing well in the Bakken are the mineral owners under the oil wells -- folks like John Bartelson. Whiting paid them $56 million in 2007. EOG declines to say what it paid, though it's certainly more because it operates more wells. Whiting gets much of its Bakken revenue from shares of EOG wells it owns. It acquired them by buying Robert Berry's remaining stake in the Parshall acreage after EOG struck oil.

Bartelson's checks are about to get bigger. One more EOG well just came online, he says, and another is about to be fractured with water. Still another has been permitted for drilling. For now, he's farming. The oil market is fickle, he says. Previous crashes drove the rigs out of North Dakota for years, leaving only the wheat.

``It'll crash again,'' Bartelson says, sipping on a late- afternoon cup of coffee beside his tractor.

Maybe so. But with crude trading above $125 a barrel, it'll be a long time before the rigs leave again, and John Bartelson is likely to be a wealthy man before they do.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170&refer=home&sid=ayj1uo_gdNI4

[Traianvs]

The challenge is getting the oil out. Bakken crude is locked 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) underground in a layer of dolomite, a dense mineral that doesn't surrender oil the way more-porous limestone does. The dolomite band is narrow, too, averaging just 22 feet (7 meters) in North Dakota.

good luck lol. Dolomite's some tough mother****ing rock

[Asher]

So I'm not sure why 4.3B barrels of oil compares with Saudi Arabia or Alberta's Oil sands.

The comparable numbers are the estimates of oil that we can get at today, which are as follows (the term you use for this is 'proven'):

Saudi Arabia: 260 billion barrels
Alberta: 174 billion barrels
North Dakota: 3-4.5 billion barrels

I don't think I need to lecture you again on misleading thread titles, do I?

(Note that North Dakota doesn't even have 3-4.5 billion barrels PROVEN...these are still estimates, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt)

((Additionally, according to the government of Canada, Alberta's proven reserves are about to increase to 315 billion barrels thanks to new technology in extracting oil. Some estimates of its future total capacity are as high as 2,500 billion barrels. As you can see, you are not comparing apples to apples; source: http://www43.statcan.ca/03/03b/03b_005c_e.htm))

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Traianvs


good luck lol. Dolomite's some tough mother****ing rock

That's the big problem.

[Winston]

Lure some Californian motorists out there. Don't worry, they'll get it out.

[Ninot]

Originally posted by Asher
So I'm not sure why 4.3B barrels of oil compares with Saudi Arabia or Alberta's Oil sands.

The comparable numbers are the estimates of oil that we can get at today, which are as follows (the term you use for this is 'proven'):

Saudi Arabia: 260 billion barrels
Alberta: 174 billion barrels
North Dakota: 3-4.5 billion barrels))

Didn't the OP say 450 something billion, not 4.5?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Traianvs


good luck lol. Dolomite's some tough mother****ing rock

Just don't mess with his hoes or his pimp cane.

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Winston

North Dakota has world's largest oil field.

Good on 'em.

But still,

This isn't so bad. Amusing.

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Traianvs


good luck lol. Dolomite's some tough mother****ing rock

"the tough black mineral that won't cop out when there's heat all about!"

[Asher]

Originally posted by Ninot



Didn't the OP say 450 something billion, not 4.5?

Oerdin was being highly misleading again.

Some dude who died 8 years ago pulled a number out of his ass of 413 billion.

The US Geological society estimates there to be 4.3 billion when they re-estimated it in April of this year. The range of modern estimates in the 3-4.5b range.

Oerdin used the old, discarded number as the basis for this entire thread, apparently without reading his actual source.

[Dinner]

No, Asher is just being his whiny self again. Bad Asher! Stop whining just to whine.

The 413 billion number is the total hydrocarbon reserves in the formation while the 4.3 billion number is the estimated total recoverable using conventional methods. Luckily with slant drilling, formation fracturing, steam introduction, and other modern techniques much, much more then 10% of the reservoir should be able to be recovered.

Asher, stick to computers because you haven't a clue about geology just like you didn't in our CG thread about Oil.

[Lancer]

So 10% would be 41 billion barrels. How many days/months or years supply is that for the US?

[Ninot]

From an article written in December:

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bakken formation could contain a mind-boggling 413 billion barrels of oil in place.

http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/news/local/story.html?id=5f07f6b9-815f-4058-9e25-17fb0c61cd61

But then Wiki has Asher's numbers