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242 comments on DrumBeat: March 18, 2008

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Gail the Actuary on March 18, 2008 - 9:12am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

At some point, it would be good to find enough information on the Barnett Shale Play to put together a post on the topic, either as a guest post or as a post by one of the TOD staff.

We get little pieces here and there. There was some earlier discussion on one of my posts.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3531#comment-295841

Do we have folks with inside knowledge of the situation. Besides Jeffrey Brown, I know that "mdsolar" has posted on the topic, and now I see Fractional_Flow. What other folks know something about the topic?

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mcgowanmc on March 18, 2008 - 10:26am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Imagine the Bartlett, Arkoma, and Fayetteville Shale to the Reelfoot Rift/Mississippi Embayment as an
Arc surrounding and caused by the uplift of the Ouachita Mountain
Range, the only East West Range in the US.

The Barnett and Fayetteville being on either side of the shallow
Arkoma.

In Arkansas, the farther East you go, the deeper the play is. To know where the current plays are, follow the County Judge.

He must be told which roads will be used/destroyed to get the wells up and running.

Right now White and Van Buren are the big plays. A man (from an article on road taxes being taken out of royalty payments) said that the 2 lane road in front of his house has interstate 40 type traffic on it.

"I don't know what they're building up there, but it must be huge (Searcy,
White County, Chaesapeake Energy)."

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elwoodelmore on March 19, 2008 - 12:55am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

"Ouachita Mountain
Range, the only East West Range in the US"

the granite range of wyoming is east-west also.

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mdsolar on March 18, 2008 - 1:05pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Gail,

I've only been following the news on this (Bakken oil). I'm not a geologist and so far as I can tell, the hold up with the USGS publishing the work that Leigh Price did is that they haven't felt qualified to assess it. What I know is that the estimate for oil in place is around 400 billion barrels of light sweet crude spread over a wide area. Development has been going on in Montana, North Dakota and Canada. The cost figure I've seen is that it is economic to extract at $60/barrel. The oil comes from shale, but is trapped in a layer of sandstone that is thin and broad. Horizontal drilling is used to access this layer which is sandwiched between two layers of shale. It sounds like now people are beginning to feel comfortable saying that 100 billion barrels could be extracted. That is about 13 years of US oil consumption. The formation also produces natural gas and one well produced "2,247 barrels of oil and 1.7 million cubic feet" of gas in a day recently. http://www.scandoil.com/moxie-bm2/by_province/americans_onshore/usa/whit...
So that is about 11% of the energy in gas. Wells have been flaring the gas but I think they all plan to capture it as soon as they can. If the gas fraction is typical then this comes to 75 trillion cubic feet of gas, about 3 years of US consumption. As I say, I'm not a geologist but I'd guess that the light stuff comes up first so that the gas fraction might decline with time.

EDIT: mixed up cubic feet and meters originally.

Chris

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westexas on March 18, 2008 - 1:28pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

You may want to review the history of the Austin Chalk Play as a pretty good analogue to the Bakken Shale Play. I suggest you quiz the engineers up the thread about what they think about 100 Gb in URR for the Bakken.

In any case, can you provide some documentation for the following?

The oil comes from shale, but is trapped in a layer of sandstone that is thin and broad. Horizontal drilling is used to access this layer which is sandwiched between two layers of shale.

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solardoc on March 18, 2008 - 3:06pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

December 3, 2007
Billions of barrels of oil found in Eastern Montana

By JENNIFER McKEE
Gazette State Bureau
HELENA - The low point came when the things got so tight that Billings petroleum geologist Richard Findley flirted with the idea of taking a second job as a restaurant cook.

He was working out of his basement, looking for oil in an Eastern Montana field almost nobody else wanted. Then, in 1996, he and his partner accidentally stumbled across a porous layer of dolomite 9,000 feet below ground at a site just a little west and north of Sidney.

That serendipity turned out to be the largest on-shore oil discovery in the continental United States in better than 20 years. Today, the oil field Findley found - and the technology he helped develop to extract the oil - has made millionaires out of ordinary Montanans, has swollen state coffers and ushered in a new philosophy of oil prospecting worldwide...

The Williston Basin is a geologic formation beneath a good chunk of Eastern Montana, most of North Dakota, parts of South Dakota and the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Within the basin is something called the Bakken Formation. The Bakken (rhymes with "talking") is a sandwich of two slabs of black shale surrounding a layer of limestone, siltstone, sandstone and dolomite, another kind of sedimentary rock...

More:
http://billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/12/03/news/state/20-oil.txt

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westexas on March 18, 2008 - 3:14pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Thanks, but I'm looking for the documentation that the 100 Gb in URR are projected to come from a thin blanket sandstone.

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mdsolar on March 18, 2008 - 3:27pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Figure 1-10 here http://www.searchanddiscovery.net/documents/2006/06035flannery/index.htm describes the middle member.

Chris

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westexas on March 18, 2008 - 4:09pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

From the linked article, regarding the middle siltstone interval:

Structural or combination structural/stratigraphic traps will be necessary for the middle Bakken to be prospective elsewhere.

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mdsolar on March 18, 2008 - 5:31pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

One way of reading the link though is that the middle member is a trap itself. The USGS has been on again off again about saying anything about this. If they do next month, perhaps we'll have some reviewed work to look at.

Chris

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Gail the Actuary on March 18, 2008 - 2:53pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Thanks. Assuming there is 100 billion barrels available (a big assumption), It will be interesting to see how much of it can be produced annually. We are currently using about 8 billion barrels a year. If it were possible to produce 4% of the 100 billion in a year, that would be half of our current use. At this point, it is probably too soon to even speculate.

We are talking about 2,247 barrels of oil a day from the one well. To get 4 billion barrels a year, we would need the equivalent of 4,877 wells producing at the rate of this one to get 10,958,904 barrels a day = 4 billion barrels a year.

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Weyburn on March 18, 2008 - 3:50pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

This article appears to talk a bit about the Middle Bakken formation exploitation going on in Canada.

The prize, the scientists and analysts say, is something between 100 and 500 billion barrels of oil. If they were correct, then the Canadian share of the wealth � spread across the shallow northeastern fringe of distribution of oil generated in North Dakota � would be in the range of five to ten billion barrels or more of original oil in place.

(emphasis mine)

Seems like they can't quite narrow it down well up here, either. But at least it makes specific reference to OOIP.

Its Saskatchewan Middle Bakken wells are shallow � 1,600 metres - relative to those in Montana, which are typically twice as deep. The Mission wells typically have 100 to 1,400 metres of lateral direction. The proprietary Halliburton completion process entails equally-spaced multiple fractures � typically ten at 120-metre separations � utilizing 10 to 12 tonnes of sand.

It should not come as much of a surprise to most of us here that it's not exactly a gusher...

The initial production rate is typically 165 barrels of oil per day, with 710 cubic feet of sales gas per barrel, and 130 barrels of hydrocarbon liquids per million cubic feet, for a net 1.25 barrels of oil equivalent of value per barrel of oil produced.

Still, I'd like to have one of those on hand in, say, 10 years.

The article mentions a related oil shale play in neighbouring Manitoba, albeit very briefly.

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westexas on March 18, 2008 - 4:22pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I think that what people are doing is taking the Bakken Shale original oil in place (OOIP) estimates--hundreds of billions of barrels of oil--and then looking at discrete sandstone/shale producing fields and then extrapolating the discrete fields across the whole play.

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mdsolar on March 18, 2008 - 9:49pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The large estimates come from analysing the shale. The novel idea is that the oil has not migrated except to the middle member. This is based on interpolation of cores that North Dakota has accumulated. There is a summary of this here: https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/bakken/newpostings/07272006_BakkenReserveEst...
and other links here: https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/bakken/bakken.asp

In connection with Gail's suggestion, maybe the best thing to do would be to interview Julie LeFever of the North Dakota Geological Survey after compiling a list of skeptical questions. This could give a better idea about the uncertainties in the high estimates perhaps.

Chris

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elwoodelmore on March 18, 2008 - 6:08pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

"Assuming there is 100 billion barrels available (a big assumption)"

assume the moon is made of white cheese and we will never run out, assume the earth is filled with a core of light sweet abiotic idiotic crude, assume anything you like.

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