Appreciated the reaction from the head of the North Dakota Petroleum Council to this story about a $1 million federal grant to the University of North Dakota intended to fund research into enhanced oil recovery in the Bakken Formation, “Prof says recoverable oil in Bakken could increase“:

Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, said the more the Bakken is researched, the better. He doubts if the university’s research alone will be responsible for doubling the production in the formation.

“It’s all good – everybody looking at this thing is helpful and we support the university,” Ness said. “But the real breakthroughs are going to come out in the field.”

Eighty-one oil rigs were operating in North Dakota this week, and each costs about $50,000 daily to operate, Ness said.

“The reality is, from an industry perspective, that’s $4 million a day that’s going into research,” Ness said.

Good thing oil companies make a profit.

From the Regina Leader-Post, a wonderful story and headline, “Striking it rich.”

REGINA — Saskatchewan pulled in $242.7 million from the August sale of Crown petroleum and natural gas rights, adding to the province’s already record-smashing 2008.

Monday’s sale was the second-best single land sale ever, bringing the year-to-date revenue from land sales to a record $848.1 million, according to figures released Thursday.

Nearly 90 percent of the August sales came from the Weyburn-Estevan area across the North Dakota border, site of the Bakken oil play.

Meanwhile, Saskatchewan is also starting development of the province’s oil sands.

More from the Globe and Mail:

VANCOUVER — British Columbia and Saskatchewan raked in a combined haul of $745-million in land rights yesterday, strengthening their claims as the hottest exploration zones in the country and edging Alberta into third place.

While Alberta, anchored by the oil sands, remains Canada’s energy king, the province is being left behind as companies race to open new oil and natural gas frontiers. For the first time, it looks like Alberta will not take in the most money this year for new exploration rights and may actually finish third behind Saskatchewan.

An ascendant Saskatchewan represents quite an economic, social and political change for Canada.

Featured on the front page of CNN.com, “North Dakota’s real-life Jed Clampett“:

STANLEY, North Dakota (CNN) – Herb Geving unleashes a broad smile in his 11,000-square-foot mansion. The former cattleman, farmer and owner of a North Dakota garbage business is now retired, able to count the dollar signs brought in by three oil wells.

“Oil,” he says, “it’s amazing. You don’t have to work at all. You just walk to the mailbox and there it is.”

The 74-year-old grandfather receives whopping checks at the end of every month for the oil. He’ll never forget the time the first check came in January.

“Thousands, I guess you’d call it,” he says.

Geving chuckles when asked if it was for $2,000.

Was it closer to $10,000?

“You can keep going up and up and up,” he says from his home, decked out with a massive fire pit in the living room, semi-circular leather couch and bright orange shag carpet.

That’s the setup to report on energy development surrounding the Bakken Formation, an oil-bearing shale formation now profitable because of horizontal drilling, hydrofracking and the high price of oil. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates 3 to 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil given current technology.

But what about the environmental damage, the frightened animals, the threatened biospherical emanations?

Well, the mountain lions seem OK: “North Dakota cougar quota increased.”

Ah, sure, you say, but that’s out there in the hinterlands. A little energy development’s OK when it’s so sparsely populated, and besides, it’s not pristine like the pristine ANWR, pristinely speaking. (Someone must say that.)

From the Wall Street Journal, August 2, “How Texas Struck It Rich Beneath Suburbia” by Texas Railroad Commissioner Elizabeth Ames Jones, writing about the 7,500 natural gas wells tapping the Barnett Shale formation, some deep in the heart of the city of Fort Worth:

What I’ve seen is that while Congress balks at drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska out of fear of disturbing a few caribou, we’ve moved ahead to safely tap into an energy reserve located underneath suburban homes. And there is no better example of how Texas gets the balance right between energy and the environment than the development of the Barnett Shale.

By the way, CNN reports its Bakken Formation story and worldwide oil prices fall. Coincidence?

As the Congressional debate between supply and no-more-supply continues this week, we highlight the benefits of energy development.

From Marketplace Morning, “Energizing Fort Worth charities“:

Kate Archer Kent: In the heart of Fort Worth, energy company money is funding the construction of an enormous steel skeleton. This isn’t another headquarters for big oil. It’s the Fort Worth museum of Science and History, getting a $75 million makeover.

The construction activity above ground mirrors what’s going on a mile-and-a-half below. The same firms that are helping refurbish the museum are drilling into the Barnett Shale, one of the nation’s largest natural gas fields.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, “Natural gas in Marcellus Shale can create revenue, jobs“:

Higher gas prices coupled with the abundant natural gas reserves trapped in Marcellus Shale underneath Western Pennsylvania have been good for those who own the rights to the gas, the drillers and gas companies, and job-seekers, say industry experts.

“It is the last great natural gas play in the United States,” said Kent F. Moors, director the Energy, Policy and Research Group at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

For the moment.  And from the Canadian Great Plains, a report from the Neue Zuricher Zeitung, the big Swiss paper, “Goldgräberstimmung in Kanadas Westen,” i.e., “Gold Rush Mood in Canada’s West”:

The economic balance is shifting west in Canada. Following in the path of the energy province, Alberta, now Saskatchewan is experiencing a boom. The province is Canada’s grain bin but is now profiting more and more from production of oil, uranium and potash.

Included is a discussion of the Bakken formation and horizontal drilling. Here’s a nice headline: “Rising standard of living.”

Columnist James Lileks of Minnesota asks an environmentalist signature-gatherer about energy development in North Dakota.

So . . . what’s the petition about?” He said that Congress had failed to renew the renewable energy tax credits, and they needed to be reinstated. I agreed that this was short-sighted, but decided not to get into all the usual hideous politics around that bill. I asked if his group was in favor of expanding all available energy sources, so we could be have baseload capacity to back up intermittent sources, like wind and solar.

“Baseload?” he said. He didn’t know the term.  I gave a rough definition; eyes glazed. Then I asked if his group was in favor of drilling in the Bakken oil fields.  He didn’t know about the Bakken oil fields.

“It’s in North Dakota,” I said.

“We’re opposed to drilling,” he said.

“In North Dakota?” I said.

“We’re opposed to drilling,” he repeated.

A few months ago I noted, in hardy-har jest, that people would oppose drilling in North Dakota because they feared its impact on the Bison, or the now-depopulated newly-pristine plains. Turns out they don’t need a reason. Nobody drill anywhere anyhow ever. I said what I’d said before, and will probably say the next time I engage in this act of total futility: if you guys were for everything, I’d be with you. We need to try everything. But he had turned cold by then.

The imperatives of the present are an inconvenient obstacle to heaven. The needs of the near future, even more so.

For a good discussion of the Bakken Formation, see this testimony to a U.S. Senate Budget Committee field hearing by Lyn Helms, director of the N.D. Industrial Commission Department of Mineral Resources. We need to get ready for the near future NOW.

The thermally mature portion of the middle Bakken member occupies over 8.4 million acres in western North Dakota. The current North Dakota drilling rig fleet is capable of developing 300,000 to 650,000 acres per year meaning full development could require 13 to 26 years. Full resource development could move North Dakota from number 8 to number 5 among US states in daily production. To achieve those production levels will require significant increases in pipeline, natural gas processing, electric generation and transmission, and refining capacity. Workforce needs will approach 12,000 new workers or over 8 new hires per day. These new workers and their families will need housing, medical facilities, schools, recreation facilities, and all of the other services expected by our modern culture.
 

Above is the Canadian Press photo that CBC used to illustrate a story, “Bakken Formation: Will it fuel Canada’s oil industry?”

Couldn’t the editors find a photo of whalers processing blubber from a right whale?

The point being that the photo depicts the mining of Canadian oil sands, which has little to do with the drilling used to access the Bakken Shale formation. That process looks more like this:

(Minnesota Public Radio photo)

Just a guess, but we bet there’s a CBC editor or two who really dislike the Canadian oil sands and will find any reason at all to justify a photo. (Without mentioning reclamation.)

BTW, the CBC story itself is quite good. Saskatchewan, long a poor relative among the provinces, is a real growth story these days.

Production from the Bakken has been stupendous,” said Roy Schneider, spokesman for Saskatchewan Energy and Resources. “As recently as 2004, production was 278,540 barrels; last year, 2007, we were nudging up against five million barrels – the exact figure was 4,965,000 barrels.

 Hope our U.S. politicians don’t alienate the Canadian oil suppliers. We need that energy.

A bright spot in domestic energy production is the Bakken Formation underlying North Dakota and Montana, its development made possible through new technology, investment by oil companies, and the fact that the much of the property is held in private hands, making it tougher for anti-energy litigants to delay and derail development.

It’s good news, too, for the Stohlers out there near Dunn Center.

In less than a year, Stohler and his wife, Lorene, 82, have become millionaires from the production of one well on their land near Dunn Center, a mile or so from the sod home where Oscar grew up. A second well has begun producing on their property and another is being drilled — all aimed at the Bakken shale formation, a rich deposit that the U.S. Geological Survey calls the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed.

Other developments…

• KXMC-TV, N.D. governor signs oil tax agreement with tribe: “Gov. John Hoeven and the chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes signed a new tax and regulatory agreement that they believe will help increase oil and gas production on the Fort Berthold reservation…The agreement puts a 5 percent limit on oil taxes on privately owned land within the reservation, and an 11.5 percent cap on taxes on tribal trust land. “
• Kiplinger.com, The U.S.’ Untapped Oil Bounty: “The Bakken Play:  With up to 100 billion barrels of oil, the reserves locked under rocks buried a mile or more beneath Montana and Saskatchewan, Canada, are more than twice the size of Alaskan’s entire oil cache. New drilling and oil recovery technologies are overcoming production obstacles and petroleum companies are rushing to stake their claims. Marathon Oil recently acquired about 200,000 acres in the area and will drill about 300 oil wells within five years. Brigham Exploration and Crescent Point Energy Trust also want a piece of the action. EOG Resources alone figures it can produce 80 million barrels of oil from its Bakken field. But It will take at least five years before the oil starts flowing in large volumes.”
• Samson Oil & Gas news release, Samson Oil & Gas to Drill a Bakken Formation Well in North Dakota: “This well is proposed to be drilled to a vertical depth of 11,335 feet, plugged back and then drilled horizontally for 4,800 feet in the middle Bakken zone. The Bakken zone is planned to be stimulated using state-of-the-art technology which will include external casing packers such that the well is stimulated along its entire horizontal length.”

Thank goodness for oil company profits.

From Holman Jenkins’ WSJ “Business World” column today, “The Coming Oil Investment Boom“:

But the biggest fools today may be those greenies who are clapping their hands over $135 oil as if this somehow represents the beginning of the end of fossil fuels. High prices are not the equivalent of carbon taxes – they will have the opposite effect in the long run, spurring investment and technological progress to bring vast new resources of fossil energy into production. For instance, turning coal, oil sands and oil shale into motor fuels, which is cost-effective at half of today’s oil price, means massive additional releases of CO2. It’s the worst nightmare of the climate worrywarts.

And from North Dakota:

BISMARCK, ND (2008-06-05) A pipeline company is proposing a $120-million project to add more oil from western North Dakota and Eastern Montana.

Enbridge Pipeline wants to upgrade 11 pumping stations in North Dakota along a pipeline that runs from northwestern North Dakota to Clearbrook, Minnesota. The project would increase the pipeline capacity by 51, 600 barrels a day — to 161,600 barrels a day.

“As we all know, North Dakota producers were suffering discounted prices, heavy apportionment on that line as the dramatic increase in production continues in the Bakken formation,” said Public Service Commissioner Kevin Cramer. “Hearing that cry from producers, Enbridge is choosing to invest heavily in the North Dakota system.”