Brigham: Three Forks, it just keeps getting better in North Dakota

Rough Rider Three Forks Well

Brigham announced the successful completion of the Irgens 27-34 #2H Three Forks well at an early 24-hour peak rate of approximately 2,906 barrels of oil equivalent (2,597 barrels of oil and 1.85 MMcf of natural gas). The Irgens 27-34 #2H was completed with 32 frac stages and is located in Brigham's Rough Rider project area in Williams County, North Dakota. The Irgens 27-34 #2H is approximately nine miles to the north northwest of the State 36-1 #2H Three Forks well, which was Brigham's first Three Forks well in Rough Rider and produced at an early 24-hour peak flow back rate of approximately 2,356 barrels of oil equivalent after being completed with 31 frac stages. Of Brigham's six Williston Basin Three Forks wells completed to date, the Irgens 27-34 #2H represents the highest early 24-hour peak rate and further delineates economic Three Forks drilling in Rough Rider.

Deepwater Horizon: Final Report

Volume I - USCG Final Action Memo on Vol I.pdf

Volume I - Enclosure to Final Action Memo.pdf

The Joint Investigation Team has released it's final report on the Deepwater Horizon explosion, loss of life and subsequent oil spill. The JIT details the evidence that BP, Transocean and haliburton violated a number of federal offshore safety regulations. Surprise!

Who pays taxes?

Peak Oil Revisited

Hubbert’s Peak or Yergin’s Plateau?
In 1956, Shell geologist M. King Hubbert correctly predicted that oil production in the United States would reach a peak around 1970. Since his Peak Oil theory fits so well with the Malthusian worldview of “Progressives”, anti-capitalists and anarchists, Hubbert has become a posthumous hero to the Left, an unusual role for a scientist polluted by the filthy lucre of the oil industry.

Hubbert's depiction of Global Peak Oil. From Wikipedia.

Peak Oil’s fundamental assumption is that the supply of oil is finite and fixed. The peak of the oil production curve is reached when half of the total resource base has been produced, so rate vs time exhibits a symmetric bell-shaped curve. Post peak, rate declines rapidly. Hubbert demonstrated a peak for oil production in Texas, and he extended his theory to correctly predict the time (but not the rate) of the peak for the U.S. World oil production is supposed to have peaked in the last five years or so.

Niobrara Formation: NW Colorado

Niobrara: DJ Basin

Halliburton vs. BP

Halliburton files claims in Texas against BP stemming from Macondo

Published: Sep 2, 2011

Offshore staff
HOUSTON – Halliburton has filed claims against BP in a Texas state court stemming from the Macondo incident in the Gulf of Mexico for negligent misrepresentation, business disparagement, and defamation. Halliburton also has moved to amend its claims against BP in multi-district litigation in New Orleans to include fraud.

Halliburton says these allegations are based upon BP providing Halliburton with inaccurate information prior to performing cementing services and BP’s use of an omission of that information in subsequent public statements, filings, and governmental investigations.

Halliburton says it has learned that BP provided Halliburton inaccurate information about the actual location of hydrocarbon zones in the Macondo well. Halliburton says the actual location of the hydrocarbon zones is critical information required prior to performing cementing services and is necessary to achieve desired cement placement.

Coastal Barrier Islands

Sarir Field, Libya

The Sarir or, more specifically, the Sarir "C" field lies on the western edge of the Calanscio Sand Sea in southern Cyrenaica and is the largest oil field in Libya. It occurs at the southeastern margin of the Upper Cretaceous-Tertiary Sirte basin or embayment that contains all the major oil fields of Libya and is the most prolific oil-producing basin in North Africa.

Total: Absheron Discovery

Total strikes major gas discovery in the Caspian Sea

September 9, 2011

Source: Total

Total (NYSE:TOT) announces a major gas discovery in the Caspian Sea in the Absheron block offshore Azerbaijan.

The Absheron X-2 well has encountered more than 500 feet of cumulated net gas pays within high quality sands on the northern flank of a major 270 square kilometres structure. Reservoirs are expected to extend over the entire northern part of the structure.

The well’s first results confirm a potential of several trillion cubic feet of gas and associated condensates.

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Arctic Map: Shell Operations

View from the top! More than 400 fields have been discovered in the Arctic region. Today, Alaska, canada, Norway, and Russia are the primary producing areas.

Eco Green Solar

The Solar Dole

Posted 09/08/2011 06:40 PM ET

Corruption: In the same week a green energy firm that wasted hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars said it was bankrupt, the White House made a multimillion-dollar loan to another solar power project. Madness reigns.
Last week, Solyndra, which builds industrial solar panels in the Bay Area, announced that it was filing for bankruptcy. The company, whose officials and investors visited the White House at least 20 times and have donated to the Obama campaign, chewed through 1,100 employees and piles of other people's money, including $535 million provided by taxpayers, before it finally succumbed to reality.
President Obama, who can't let go of his party's eco-energy fantasy, toured Solyndra's Fremont, Calif., plant last year. He identified the company as an example of the "positive impacts" of his stimulus plan and called it "a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism." The president and the thinkers in his administration dreaming of a green economy merrily claimed Solyndra would eventually employ 4,000.
What made them think this when Solyndra's own accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers considered the company's business model to be shaky and expressed "substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern"?
Learning nothing from the Solyndra crackup and the many other green-energy failures, the White House, also last week, handed out an $852 million loan guarantee to the Genesis Solar Project in California. This 1,950-acre slice of federal land in Riverside County filled with parabolic solar panels is supposed to produce enough power — 250 megawatts — to light, heat and cool more than 48,000 homes.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who apparently has yet to meet a fossil fuel he can like, no matter how cheap and efficient it might be, stands fully behind the Genesis Solar Project. He wants the public to believe that it "will enable the deployment of clean, renewable sources at scale, which will help bring down the cost of solar power in the years to come."
Chu can be as blindly optimistic as he is blind to the facts about energy. Standing behind yet another poor government choice won't tarnish his professional reputation or ruin his career. But the hard lesson to be learned is that the Genesis Solar Project is bound to be another boondoggle.

How can it not be? If it were a viable project, it would be a magnet for private-sector investment. That it needs government help is an indicator that the market knows it's a venture not worth capitalizing.

Department of the Interior: Offshore Alaska Areas

Statoil Aldous Field Discovery

High impact discovery in our core area!

Utsira High, Greater Sleipner area

~140 km west of Stavanger

35 km south of Grane

Water depth: 112 meters

Reservoir depth: ~ 1900 meters

Drilling rig: Transocean Leader

Hebron Field, Offshore Newfoundland

The Hebron Unit contains separate oil pools in at least four stratigraphicintervals: the Lower Cretaceous Ben Nevis Reservoir, the Lower Cretaceous Avalon Reservoir, the Lower Cretaceous Hibernia Reservoir and the Upper Jurassic Jeanne d’Arc Reservoir. The field was discovered circa 1981 and first oil production is targeted for 2016 or 2017.

U.S. Crude Oil Production

Interoil: Elk/Antelope Field

This discovery has created quite a controversy in the investment world. Some big gas numbers have been posted.....is it for real?