Talk:Bakken Formation
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[edit] Cost of Extraction
Am I confusing extracting "oil in shale" from extracting "oil from shale"? The cost of extracting "oil from shale" is prohibitive. From both a $/barrel viewpoint, and an environmental viewpoint. I think this article needs a section examining this problem.
However if I have confused the two, please disregard that comment, and maybe add a section, for slow people like me, explaining that this is not the same as extracting oil from shale. Pommerenke (talk) 22:32, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
- The Bakken is not an oil shale in the usual sense. It is a formation that yields oil with difficulty. In fact the main productive zone is a dolomite. Cheers Geologyguy (talk) 01:59, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Production numbers
I'm a little confused. In one section of the article, it says "is expected to ultimately total 270 million barrels", yet in two paragraphs below, it talks about estimates over a billion. Was the estimates really that far off, or was there a typo? Thanks! (sorry, I'm not sure if I'm asking this question in the right place) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.106.0.166 (talk) 22:03, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
- The 270 million refers to the ultimate production of Elm Coulee field alone. The higher numbers refer to the entire Bakken play, which may eventually include many fields. Cheers Geologyguy (talk) 23:25, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Could someone update the yield numbers with the timeframes they go with? XX barrels per day/week/year/lifetime. I don't know typical order of magnitude of these things, and suspect many others also do not, and seeing a number without a time period leaves me wondering. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.73.139.54 (talk) 14:20, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
- "ultimate" means over the life of the well, field, basin, whatever. How long that is, though, is another question. So the information you ask for would be useful - but I don't have it, not right now anyway - will work on it. Cheers Geologyguy (talk) 14:22, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Media Coverage of April 2008
I just read a news article that says, "up to 400 billion barrels of light, sweet crude oil for America's future can be pumped from under Manitoba and North Dakota. That's more oil than Saudi Arabia and Russia put together." ( http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0408/0408dakotaoil.htm )
Is this author confusing oil with technically recoverable oil? If so, would you describe this article as irresponsible? Or is it merely overly optimistic? Maybe Geologyguy would be so kind as to answer these questions. Thanks 199.46.245.231 (talk) 18:29, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
- The USGS estimate is for 3 to 4.3 billion recoverable barrels. Figures of 300 to 500 billion barrels of oil in place have been tossed around for some time, and just before the USGS report was actually issued, there was much reporting that they would estimate the recoverable reserve in hundreds of billions, which they did not. Perhaps (to be charitable) the article cited above may have been one of those. User RockyMtnGuy is much more familiar with Canadian reserves than I am and may have something to say as well. The bit that I (think) I know about the Bakken would suggest that its facies and thickness as you get into Canada is not likely to return the production rates of Elm Coulee or some of the discoveries in west-central North Dakota. Cheers Geologyguy (talk) 19:53, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
"All researchers agree that the Bakken Formation is a tremendous source rock. The controversy lies with how much oil has been generated, what other formations it may have sourced, and how much is ultimately recoverable. Early research on the Bakken started with a 1974 landmark paper by Wallace Dow, a UND Geology graduate, that addressed the oil generation capacity of the Bakken shale. Since that time, several additional papers have re-evaluated the Bakken, each bringing its own controversy over how much oil the Bakken is capable of generating and more importantly, how much of that oil can be economically produced. The current controversy involves a paper by the late Dr. Leigh Price formerly of the United States Geological Survey in Denver, Colorado. He was an innovative thinker that challenged many of the traditional viewpoints of petroleum geochemistry. After an extensive oil sampling program by the North Dakota Geological Survey showed oil from the Bakken is compositionally distinct, further work, additional analyses, and many discussions with Dr. Price resulted in the controversial paper under review. The methods used by Price to determine the amount of hydrocarbons generated by the Bakken and the idea that the oil has not migrated out of the Bakken are under dispute." from http://www.nd.gov/ndic/ic-press/bakken-form-06.pdf WAS 4.250 (talk) 00:46, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
- We have three different concepts involved here: oil in place versus technically recoverable oil versus economically recoverable oil. The media is assuming that all of the oil in place can be recovered, which is patently rediculous. The Bakken, from all reports, is a very tight formation with very low porosity and permeability. The sweet spots which give the best results only have about a 5% recovery rate, which is much lower than most oil fields. Most of the formation is likely to be closer to 1% recovery, which assuming there are 300 to 500 billion bbl of oil in place, would mean 3 to 5 billion bbl of technically recoverable oil. That sounds rather close to the USGS estimate of 3 to 4.2 billion bbl. And that brings us to the third concept, economically recoverable oil. How much of it can be recovered at a profit? The USGS has a track record of being overoptimistic about economics, so I would tend to assume that most of their technically recoverable oil might turn out not to be economically recoverable. Nobody knows at this point in time.
- From the Canadian perspective, the Bakken extends under southeastern Saskatchewan and is the largest oil field in Saskatchewan, and may well turn out to be the largest conventional oil field in Canada. Which is nice - until you consider non-conventional oil. Canadian oil sands contain at least 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen in place, and a government study estimated 175 billion barrels of it to be economically recoverable assuming much lower prices and much lower recovery rates than oil companies are currently getting. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 07:08, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
The issues you raise are indeed among the important distictions that need to be made to understand the issue here. But it is even more complicated than that. One key change has been that the technologically recoverable oil has increased greatly with the successful development of horizontal drilling. Another key is that the economically recoverable oil is greatly increased with the rise in oil prices. But the main two arguents going on right now among the experts is how much oil has migrated out versus stayed put ("The results of this study were published by Price and LeFever in 1994 and showed that the Bakken is “truly dysfunctional” with no evidence in the analysis that Bakken-generated oil had migrated into the overlying Madison beds, as previously thought." http://www.nd.gov/ndic/ic-press/bakken-form-06.pdf ) and is the geological model presented by Price accurate or not ("The geological model presented by Price in his paper appears solid and is built upon considerable input by North Dakota Geological Survey geologists, samples from the ND Core and Sample Library, and the well files from the Oil and Gas Division. A sophisticated computer program with extensive data input supplied by the ND Geological Survey and Oil and Gas Division places the Bakken generated value at 200 – 300 BBbls. How much of the generated oil is recoverable remains to be determined. Estimates of 50%, 18%, and 3 to 10% have been published. The Bakken play on the North Dakota side of the basin is still early in the learning curve. Technology and the price of oil will dictate what is potentially recoverable from this formation." http://www.nd.gov/ndic/ic-press/bakken-form-06.pdf ). WAS 4.250 (talk) 12:16, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
- Well, one would think that if they had core samples and well logs to look at, they would know how much oil was in the rock. After all, if you can't extract the oil from the rock in the lab, your chances of getting it out in the field are slim. In the case of the Bakken, I think we can take the USGS word that it's there in the rock samples, I think the question is whether it can be extracted at reasonable cost. There are lots of places where oil is still trapped in the source rock, and nobody is ever going to get it out with conventional technology because it just won't move through the rock. You can persuade it by throwing modern technology at it, but there are limits to the number of 10,000 foot deep horizontal wells you can afford to drill at $5 million a pop, and how much hydraulic fracturing you can afford to do on them. The current bump in production in the Bakken is due to horizontal drilling and fracturing, but the wells have a very short producing life, and that is a serious limitation on their profitability. Anyhow, here's a link to an in-depth analysis of the Bakken that I found at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3868 Another thought I have is that it took about $1 billion in government research money to get Canadian oil sands technology to its current state (and well worth it at today's oil prices). How much is the U.S. spending on research on the Bakken? Is it spending anything? RockyMtnGuy (talk) 17:19, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
