http://www.northernoil.com/drilling.php
Note By Don Forster: Several of you have asked how wells are drilled horizontally and how are they fraced. I trust this video and site will answer some of your questions.
In the forty years that I was involved in the oil industry many innovations were developed to overcome nature’s obstacles and man-made roadblocks. These innovations were referred to as “breakthroughs”. I am very excited about this latest breakthrough since it allows development of giant oil reservoirs heretofor considered to be sub-commercial (non-profitable). Additionally, the new development is well timed. Our country currently pays billions of dollars in trade deficits to acquire our oil needs from foreign countries, many of which are unfriendly to the United States. This will reduce our deficit spending while at the same time offerimg employment opportunities to many. Economic opportunity will be generated by housing demand and all of the support industries, including reasaurants and motels etc. Believe me, oil people do like to eat and they generally eat well!
It remains to see what negative impacts may be generated by the anti-oil lobby and its companions; i.e. enviromnmentalist scare groups, additional regulations made by people totally unfamiliar with the oil industry and lawsuits/injunctions etc. I have seen this all before. Instances where concerns for endangered rattlesnakes, rodents, and birds will hold up development. The industry is fully aware of these obstacles and has developed many innovations f or satisfying the oppositions concerns.
It will be interesting to see how this and future administrations, Congress and state regulatory bodies react to oil company proposals. Opposition from these sources often eclipse the obstacles Mother Nature places before oil development.
BY THE WAY, THE DRILLING AND COMPLETION METHODS SHOWN IN THE VIDEO ARE ALSO APPLICABLE TO GAS RESERVOIRS; THERE ARE MANY SHALE GAS RESERVOIRS IN THE U.S. WAITING TO BE DEVELOPED. (end of comments by Don Forster… the following comments were made by the (unknown) author of this article.)
I crossed western North Dakota a couple months ago and was amazed at all the oil work going on. Williston is booming with Halliburton and other oil company equipment everywhere. Hotels are full of workers and trailer courts of 8×30 campers are going in. It is a real boom town compared to the last time I was there. I didn’t understand how they drilled laterally and I appreciate the information.
I think that one reason that it is booming is because much of the drilling is on private land in a business friendly state. For those of you that haven’t been following oil development in North Dakota, the Bakken shale underlies about the western third of the state and is estimated to contain over 500 Billion barrels. Yes that is Billion – not a typo. For comparison, Saudi Arabia has 25 billion and Alaska about the same. Recoverable with current technology is apparently 20% although two companies drilled two laterals in the same section in Mountrail County last summer. Up until those, the procedure was to go down vertically in one corner of a section (square mile) and drill horizontally (the lateral) at a diagonal across the section. (The closing scenes in the video are not Bakken wells – the wells are too close together.) One lateral in each section taps into a very small amount of the shale formation. Multiple laterals in one section may substantially increase the recoverable amounts. I’ve seen the Bakken crude and seen chemical analyses of it – it is very close to kerosene or diesel fuel – some of the sweetest crude in the world.
Initial production from the Bakken wells ranges from 300 to 2400 barrels per day depending on location since the shale seems to be different in different areas. The Sanish-Three Forks shale is immediately below the Bakken and underlies all of North Dakota.
The Bears Den shale is below that and it also appears to underlie all of North Dakota. No estimates on total oil in either of these yet. All three of these formations extend into Montana and Saskatchewan.
I’ve seen one article on the Bakken oil developments in the Wall Street Journal – nothing in any of the other media. Do you suppose that they fear support for alternative energy development would collapse if the public knew we have enough oil in North Dakota alone to supply our country’s needs for many years to come?? Apparently they would prefer to cover the prairies with wind farms and the deserts with solar panels.
Despite climate-gate and some seriously cold weather this winter they are still pushing global warming. In contrast to most states, North Dakota had $1 Billion surplus last year that they put into public schools and reduced our property taxes… mostly from the severance tax on oil.
Activist-scientists cooked the books to foster alarm…
By Lorne Gunter, Edmonton JournalJanuary 31, 2010
I can’t recall the wheels coming off the bus of any expert-driven hysteria as fast or as completely as they are now coming off the global-warming scare. I suppose they must have came off faster from Y2K. At 12:00:01 AM on Jan. 1, 2000, when airliners didn’t fall from the sky and power plants didn’t shut down spontaneously or computers didn’t freeze up all over the world, the air came out of the Y2K scare instantly.
Billions had been spent on preventing that disaster-that-never-was up until midnight on the final day of 1999, then almost not a penny afterwards. That is faster than the wheels are coming off the climate-change bus.
But AGW — anthropogenic global warming — is a very close second. News of the manipulations, distortions and frauds perpetrated to advance and preserve the environmentalists’ cause celebre are so numerous and coming so fast, it’s hard to keep up. First, of course, there were the e-mails and computer files leaked from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) -one of a handful of climate-research centres around the world that are the pillars of the United Nations’ claims about impending climate doom. The CRU leaks showed many of the world’s leading climate scientists discussing how they could torque their research to show more recent warming than there has been, conceal their “tricks” from other scientists and government investigators, and pressure scientific journals not to publish reports by dissenting scientists.
Then a couple of weeks ago came the news that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate-change arm, had based its most recent findings on Himalayan glacier melt on an old study that had never been peer-reviewed or even published and which was based entirely on the speculation (not research) of a single Indian scientist who now works at the environmental think-tank run by the head of the IPCC, economist Rajendra Pachauri. This by itself wouldn’t be devastating, except that the scientist in charge of the glacier chapter of the IPCC’s latest assessment report (AR4) admitted he had known the melt estimate was wrong but had included it anyway because “we thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”
That’s not climate science, it’s environmental activism, pure and simple — using misleading figures to whip up alarm and bring about political action. Another revelation of malfeasance this week was the discovery that the chapter on Amazon rainforests in the IPCC’s AR4, the one that included the often-repeated claim that 40 per cent of the forest is under imminent threat from climate change, was written not by climate scientists but by a policy analyst who works for environmental groups and a freelance environmental author. Like the glacier chapter, it was written not to present the latest dispassionate scientific data, but to present a propaganda case that would produce the policy outcome the UN and the IPCC want. It confirmed that the UN is a player for one side in the climate debate, not the source for object facts.
In all, so far, at least 16 major claims made in AR4 (the report for which the IPCC won a Nobel Prize) have been shown to have originated with environmental groups rather than scientists, including the claim that climate change is already making tornado, hurricanes, forest fires and floods worse. This week, we also learned that NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies
(GISS) may have been playing fast and loose with its own calculations of global average temperature. Among the four main repositories of global temperature records, GISS is the only one to show the Earth still warming during the past decade. Now two American climate researchers — Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts — believe they know why: Scientists at GISS may have been cherry-picking the weather stations they take their records from to increase global averages artificially. The pair write that there was a “major” decline in the number of stations GISS scientists were taking readings from “and an increase in missing data from remaining stations, which occurred suddenly around 1990 … a clear bias was found toward removing higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations — the cooler stations — during this culling process.” The pre-1990 temperature records, though, continued to include these cooler stations. These changes tended to make temperatures before 1990 appear extra-cool and those after 1990 extra-warm. This probably shouldn’t surprise — GISS is run by James Hansen, the scientist who first set off the global-warming scare in 1988 and who is an adviser to former U.S. vice-president Al Gore. Hansen has testified in court on behalf of eco-vandals charged with damaging a British power plant, insisting they are guilty of no crime because they were acting in defence of humanity and he has called coal trains “death trains” and coal-fired power plants “factories of death.” Again, those are the words of an activist, not a scientist. Does all this prove global warming is a hoax? I believe it does. But at the least, it shows the science is far from settled.
lgunter@shaw.ca Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
Filed under: Global Warming
Global warming alarmists want Americans to believe that humans are killing the planet. But Not Evil Just Wrong, a new documentary by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, proves that the only threats to America (and the rest of the world) are the flawed science and sky-is-falling rhetoric of Al Gore and his allies in environmental extremism.
The film drives home the realities of that extremism. “Turn off your lights. Turn off your heat when you get cold. Turn off your air when you get hot,” one man on the street says. “And then think about that.”
Not Evil Just Wrong warns Americans that their jobs, modest lifestyles and dreams for their children are at stake. Industries that rely on fossil fuels will be crippled if the government imposes job-killing regulations on an economy already mired in recession. Small towns in the heartland, like Vevay, Ind., will become bastions of unemployment and poverty. Breadwinners like Tim McElhany in Vevay will lose their jobs — and will have to start borrowing money again just to buy bread for their families.
The damage that would be wrought is unjustified by the science. Not Evil Just Wrong exposes the deceptions that experts, politicians, educators and the media have been force-feeding the public for years. Man-made pollution is not melting the polar icecaps. The ocean will not rise 20 feet in a flash. And the only polar bears dying because of man are the ones who try to eat men.
McAleer and McElhinney debunk what, for a time, was the environmental movement’s most powerful weapon of disinformation, the infamous “hockey stick” graph that attributed a supposedly unique burst of warming in the 20th century to humans. They also shatter the myth that the hottest years in the United States were 1998 and 2006. The hottest year was 1934, and the hottest decade was the 1930s — when there were half as many people and no SUVs or jumbo jets.
NOTE: This video is available from American Family Association (AFA) at their website:
Filed under: Global Warming
Here is a FANTASTIC (although some 30+ pages long) article on Global Warming, and the fallacy in “blaming” it on man’s feeble efforts. The premise is backed by facts, equations, graphs, pictures, etc. and will give you plenty of ammunition with which to defeat the puny arguments of the liberals!
http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/global-warming-01.html#top
