Perfect! Why have ALL that carbon in the ground, when we can have it ALL in our atmosphere! That exactly what we need!!!

yeah, we have a lot of hard to refine oil in Utah, lets take out the wasatch mountains, who needs this place anyways but all those LA types that like to do Sundance film festivals. Besides Zions National Park, Moab are way over rated. Isnt Utah the place where the federal government wanted to put all the nuclear waste from all of America.

Lets just fuck up alaska too, who needs trees the clean our air, who needs nature for animals that hang in the balance our own survival as a species on this planet.

fuck who needs all of you, maybe if you, more humans die off, then there would be less to share, even though it would most likely kill me off too.

Because fuck, jesus is coming to take me out of this hell holel, scotty beam me up because I am sufering from delusions of unlimited possibility in the face of a small world.

>>"The U.S. Geological Survey calls it the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed. "<<

This article by a petroleum engineer puts the USGS assessment of **undiscovered** oil in the Bakken formation in the proper perspective:

www.theoildrum.com/node/3868#more

A few quotes:

"The USGS numbers are notable for their apparent certainty of the size of the undiscovered resources. The p5/p95 ratio is one measure of the spread or uncertainty of a probabilistic estimate. The USGS oil numbers show ratios of 1.2 to 1.9, which is quite surprising. These low ratios imply that the USGS is highly confident in their recoverable resource estimates. One would have thought that a 5X or 10X spread in this ratio would be more plausible considering that 85% to 90% of the resources has not yet been discovered. Perhaps when the detailed report is released, the logic behind this narrow range will be revealed. In the mean time, I remain highly skeptical that such a large resource with an unknown variability of fracture density, porosity, and recovery factor, and other factors, can be quantified with such precision."

"If we could actually produce 3.6 billion barrels of undiscovered oil forecast at the P50 level by USGS, how much would this equate to? The US uses about 7.6 billion barrels of oil products a year, according to EIA data. This is equivalent to just under six month's US oil use, spread over a very long period, probably 20 years or more. If total production amounts to only 500 million barrels, as I have suggested, this would equate to about 23 days worth of United States oil usage, spread over many, many years."

"Conclusions

1. The Bakken shale has produced about 111 million barrels of oil during the last 50+ years in Montana and North Dakota.

2. Total Bakken production is still rising, and producing at the rate of 75,000 BOPD in October 2007.

3. Because of the highly variable nature of shale reservoirs, the characteristics of the historical Bakken production, and the fact that per-well rates seem to have peaked, it seems unlikely that total Bakken production will exceed 2x to 3x current rate of 75,000 BOPD.

4. The latest boom in Bakken production is driven by the application of horizontal wells and hydraulic fracturing technology, which has added about 70 million barrels of production in 7 years. Ultimate recovery of the already-drilled wells should be at least double this volume.

5. The USGS estimates the mean volume of technically recoverable hydrocarbons to be 3,649 million barrels of oil. This is roughly 7 to 12 times the size of already known resources.

6. Based on current production and areas likely to be drilled, the USGS estimate of technically recovery resources seems optimistic.

7. The Bakken potential resource, while large by US onshore field standards, will have only a minor effect on US production or imports. Using 2006 US imports and consumption for comparison, the Bakken undiscovered resource of 3,649 million barrels of oil, if subsequently discovered and fully developed, would provide us with the equivalent of six months of oil consumption or 10 months of imports, spread over 20 or more years. In reality, the reserves developed are likely to be many times smaller than this value.

8. The October 2007 production rate of 75,000 BOPD amounts only 0.4% of US oil consumption, or 0.6% of imports.

9. Per-well Bakken production peaked in August 2005 at 116 barrels a day, and was down to 79 barrels a day in October 2007. If the Bakken production history in the 1990s can be used as a guide, the peaking of per-well production may portend a peak in total Bakken production."

Here are some good links to what the USGS actually reported:

www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp

pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2008/302...3021_508.pdf

energy.usgs.gov/flash/Bakk...ideshow.swf

Some things to be aware of about this report:

(1) Th USGS assessment includes the entire area where the Bakken is in the "oil window" (depth, pressure, and temperature region where oil is being generated from the organic material in the shale) referring the the generated oil as "technically recoverable". Technically recoverable does not equate to economically recoverable. There are only a couple of areas where oil is currently being produced from the Bakken and these areas may be and if fact most likely are structurally and stratigraphically distinct from most of the basin. In simple terms they have favorable fracture density, are sufficiently brittle to fracture, and contain beds between the oil producing shales that are able to hold and produce some hydrocarbons with sufficient fracture intensity. They are "sweet" spots where conditions are just right to allow an otherwise impermable rock to produce some oil. Even here heroic technical efforts are required to make economic wells. Surely there are many more "sweet" spots to be found, but to assume the entire oil generating area can be economically produced is not reasonable.

(2) The fact the USGS is making an assessment of **undiscovered** resources here seems to not be understood by many touting the "discovery" of huge resources of oil in the Bakken. The USGS is not talking about any oil discovery, only assessing what could theoretically be found if many exploration wells are drilled in the area.

(3) Whether these exploration wells are drilled depends a lot on the price of oil. "Resource" plays like the Bakken look good at $100/barrel, but if oil but if oil drops back to $60/barrel, they will no longer be economic and won't be drilled. If we are not at "peak oil" and supply again overruns demand, the estimated 3.65 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken will remain in the ground. What we can see from all this is that rather than the potential reserves in the Bakken mitigating the peak of conventional oil supplies, the exploitation of this potential resource actually requires a situation where oil price is high and potentially going higher still.

>>"The U.S. Geological Survey calls it the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed."<<

Here is another good discussion of the Bakken oil play:

www.aspo-usa.com/index.php

Some quotes:

"The assessment of the Bakken Formation indicates that most of the undiscovered oil resides within a continuous composite reservoir that is distributed across the entire area of the oil generation window (fig. 2) and includes all members of the Bakken Formation. At the time of this assessment, only a limited number of wells have produced from the Bakken continuous reservoir in the Central Basin–Poplar Dome AU, the Eastern Expulsion Threshold AU, and the Northwest Expulsion Threshold AU. Therefore, there is significant geologic uncertainty in these estimates, which is reflected in the range of estimates for oil (table 1 [graph above left]).

Few will remember the geologic uncertainty. Most will remember the large numbers. Here are some telling—damning?—observations and comments on the USGS results—

1. Operators in Elm Coulee, which forms part of the Elm Coulee-Billings Nose AU, were skeptical about the USGS estimates. The International Herald Tribune reported that "Donald Kessel, vice president of Houston-based Murex Petroleum Corp., said he believes the Geological Survey's assessment of how much oil can be recovered in the Bakken may be a little on the high side. "That's a lot of zeros," Kessel said Thursday [about the 3,645,000,000 barrels].

2. The Elm-Coulee-Billings Nose AU has the smallest mean estimate, coming in at 410 million barrels, yet that is the only part of middle Bakken play undergoing extensive development. Headington's guess was somewhere in excess of 250 million barrels for "the area", but it is not clear whether this is just for Elm Coulee, or also includes some other parts of the Survey's assessment unit.

3. The USGS indicates that its largest estimates are for the areas where, by its own admission, "only a limited number of wells have produced." This includes the Eastern Expulsion Threshold AU, for example, where the Survey estimates an astonishing 973 million undiscovered and unrecovered barrels. There's always more oil where you haven't looked according to the USGS.

4. Middle Bakken expert Tom Lantz (link op. cit.) has this to say about the geology of some of the undeveloped but supposedly oil-rich assessment units covered by the USGS—

Certainly the thrust of the Middle Bakken play is moving north and east into the deeper sections of the basin in North Dakota. Since the lithology changes from higher quality dolomitic facies to a lower quality sandy/silty facies, the reservoir does not seem to be nearly as forgiving in North Dakota ... as it is in the original play area [Elm Coulee]. The ultimate extent and duration of the play will hinge on how effective we are in understanding these changes and tailoring the drilling and completion designs to exploit this lower quality reservoir. "

..."According to Jim Ehrets, a Denver-based geologist with Headington Oil Co. of Dallas, it costs about $5 million to drill a well tapping the middle Bakken, and companies need crude prices of at least $50 a barrel to make it economical. Even with crude prices now double that, "there still is a ton of risk," he said.

Given the expense and complexity of drilling in the Bakken, it is no wonder that there is "a ton of risk" for operators—success is not guaranteed. The risk is so large that "drillers began sharing technology about two years ago on how to recover the oil" according to the AP report.

Bakken_horizontal_well_simulation What about the successful wells? Unfortunately, a successful well at the Bakken will produce a few hundreds, not thousands, of barrels of oil per day. Landmark's 3000 foot horizontal well simulation (graph left) reveals that in the best case, with a permeability after hydraulic fracturing of 0.66 milladarcies, the well would produce 150,000 thousand barrels (averaging 375 stock tank barrels per day) after 400 days or so (purple line). As the curve shows, cumulative production declines dramatically thereafter, leveling off at approximately 370,000 barrels over the well's lifespan of 18+ years.

Elm Coulee provides a real-world snapshot of Bakken production as it stood in 2006. Headington Oil Company has made some useful data available that helps us evaluate how things might go in the future. Here are the pertinent facts & figures—

* The cumulative oil production 6 years after discovery is 32 million barrels. Production from about 350 wells had reached 1.6 million barrels in March, 2006. This works out to 53,000 barrels per day with an average well producing about 152 barrels per day.

* About 520 square miles are under development and there were 20 drilling rigs working continuously as of November, 2006.

* Headington estimates ultimate recovery from the area will be somewhere in excess of 250 million barrels, assuming ≅ 500,000 barrels will be ultimately recovered per square mile.

Combining Headington's Elm Coulee data with the Landmark simulation, we can draw the following conclusions—

* Well productivity drops off rapidly after the first year or so of production. If other parts of the Middle Bakken are as productive as the drilled parts of Elm Coulee, and constant large investment in drilling activity in the western Williston Basin continues, we might see peak production somewhere in excess of 100,000 barrels per day. This is an educated guess, but this estimate is not off by an order of magnitude, i.e. we are talking about peak production rates in the very low hundreds of thousands, not millions, of barrels of oil per day.

* It will likely take another 5-10 years to ramp Middle Bakken production up to its peak level as described just above.