North Dakota is Hiring

[guido911]

Just passing the word...

http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/18/pf/north-dakota-jobs/index.html?source=yahoo_hosted

[Red Arrow]

Just passing the word...

http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/18/pf/north-dakota-jobs/index.html?source=yahoo_hosted

I'm not moving any farther North than Bixby.  ND is w-a-y too cold for me in the winter.

[cannon_fodder]

If I this warmth you want their are always oil jobs in Saudi and Qatar.

[dbacksfan 2.0]

Guido, I guess you were not around in the early 70's when western Oklahoma had their oil boom. Started around 1973 and lasted until Reagan forced the price of oil down to the point that gas went from $1.09/gal to $.54/gal in the span of about 6 months, and crushed OK, TX, and LA. If anyone in DC has the balls, they could do to Putin regarding natural gas, they way Reagan did OPEC with oil then.

But hey, what do I know......

[Red Arrow]

If I this warmth you want their are always oil jobs in Saudi and Qatar.

I probably would not like Saudi or Qatar in spite of warm temperatures.

[dbacksfan 2.0]

I probably would not like Saudi or Qatar in spite of warm temperatures.

No Marshal's. Need I say more?

[Red Arrow]

No Marshal's. Need I say more?

That's enough but there are plenty more reasons that I would not want to go to either of those places.

[guido911]

Guido, I guess you were not around in the early 70's when western Oklahoma had their oil boom. Started around 1973 and lasted until Reagan forced the price of oil down to the point that gas went from $1.09/gal to $.54/gal in the span of about 6 months, and crushed OK, TX, and LA. If anyone in DC has the balls, they could do to Putin regarding natural gas, they way Reagan did OPEC with oil then.

But hey, what do I know......

I didn't become an Okie until 1996.

[dbacksfan 2.0]

I didn't become an Okie until 1996.

Guido, sorry if I came off as being an a$$, it's just I remember when Oklahoma had it's boom years from the early 70's until the early 80's when towns like Elk City, Weatherford, Anadarko, and others in western OK exploded like North Dakota is now in drilling and producing oil. There was a popular bumper sticker back then that said "Don't tell mom I work in the oil patch, she thinks I'm a piano player in a whore house". I actually had a chance to go work in ND in the telecommunications field, but at 50, and owning a Miata, I just could not go work as a cable rat doing outside cable work.

I just wonder how long the area can sustain the growth, and if for some reason the price of crude drops below what they can produce it for, it could dry up in no time.

I still remember when the Hunt Brothers built their office tower in Dallas, and upon completion in 1984 they had a 40 story high rise with 4 employees, and those were security guards.

It's just the shifting patterns in oil and gas that I wouldn't place a bet on. Then again, with my dad working for McDonnell Douglas, retired after 30 years in 1987, and all the people that I knew whose parents worked at Rockwell, American, and Telex, I thought the tide would never end in that area either.

[nathanm]

I suppose it's a good idea to go try and make it in ND if you want to spend 75% of your pay on housing. Seriously, housing is crazy freakin' expensive up there right now because of all the new people flooding into an area even more sparsely populated than western oklahoma.

[dbacksfan 2.0]

I suppose it's a good idea to go try and make it in ND if you want to spend 75% of your pay on housing. Seriously, housing is crazy freakin' expensive up there right now because of all the new people flooding into an area even more sparsely populated than western oklahoma.

It was a tempting contract offer, but it just did not pencil out. That, and up to my a$$ in snow at times, I had to pass. Too old to climb poles, or do cable splicing in a pit in winter. And yes housing was ridiculous.

[cannon_fodder]

If I this warmth you want their are always oil jobs in Saudi and Qatar.

Sheesh... me write gud.  /fail

[Conan71]

Guido, sorry if I came off as being an a$$, it's just I remember when Oklahoma had it's boom years from the early 70's until the early 80's when towns like Elk City, Weatherford, Anadarko, and others in western OK exploded like North Dakota is now in drilling and producing oil. There was a popular bumper sticker back then that said "Don't tell mom I work in the oil patch, she thinks I'm a piano player in a whore house". I actually had a chance to go work in ND in the telecommunications field, but at 50, and owning a Miata, I just could not go work as a cable rat doing outside cable work.

I just wonder how long the area can sustain the growth, and if for some reason the price of crude drops below what they can produce it for, it could dry up in no time.

I still remember when the Hunt Brothers built their office tower in Dallas, and upon completion in 1984 they had a 40 story high rise with 4 employees, and those were security guards.

It's just the shifting patterns in oil and gas that I wouldn't place a bet on. Then again, with my dad working for McDonnell Douglas, retired after 30 years in 1987, and all the people that I knew whose parents worked at Rockwell, American, and Telex, I thought the tide would never end in that area either.

Interesting article on the Bakken Shale play.  Estimates on recoverable oil are a constantly moving target.  Technology keeps improving so do the estimates.  One thing we do know is that one day, it will start to dry up.  What we don't know is what technology has yet to be developed to squeeze even more oil out of rock that can make plays like this keep producing even longer. 

Faced with production declines, drillers cook up new recipes for growth

Shale oil, trapped thousands of feet below the North Dakota soil, is under extreme pressure. And in a way, the same is true of Continental Resources Inc.

The Bakken-focused firm turned in 39 percent production growth last year and reaffirmed its goal of tripling production by 2017. But to get there -- and to do its part for the U.S. energy boom -- it will have to keep wringing oil out of increasingly stubborn rocks.

Last year, the Bakken began to show signs that it's not going to surrender oil as easily as it once did. And that's motivated top drillers, including Continental, to cook up new ways of keeping the crude flowing.

One key technique: downspacing. This year, Continental will drill in tighter parallels -- like sticking more straws into the same horizontal milkshake -- to get more of the oil it knows is there.

"If successful, we think other operators in the region could follow suit which could spur an additional acceleration of well counts in the region," a team of Barclays Capital analysts led by James West wrote last month.

It's not that anyone believed the Bakken's meteoric growth -- now topping a million barrels of oil per day, from less than 200,000 a day in 2007 -- would last forever. But last year, more observers began to ask whether current technology's limit is coming into view.

"Rate of growth slowing," EOG Resources Inc. summarily said of the Bakken in a February investor presentation.

It said the Bakken has transformed from a "steady growth" play to one where return on investment -- and high-efficiency drilling -- are king. While EOG will spend more in the Bakken this year, it will focus on harvesting its core locations, not hunting for new ones.

"We are seeing the impact of decline rates and a slowing rate of change in the Bakken," analysts with Credit Suisse wrote last month.

Their report compared the first 10 months of 2012 to the first 10 months of 2013. Production grew in both periods, but the 2013 gain was 38 percent smaller.

"The magnitude of the deceleration in growth was a bit of a surprise in light of improved completion techniques used throughout the basin," said the team led by Edward Westlake.

Keeping up with the curve

Less than a decade into the domestic oil and gas boom, shale plays have begun to show similar tendencies. After companies scramble into a promising new play, a tug-of-war between technology and geology takes over.

Shale's very nature, unlike that of conventional drilling, is to burst with oil or gas in the first year, then peter out rapidly. It results in current recovery rates that may seem modest to the casual observer: in the Bakken, usually between 2 and 10 percent of the resource in place.

This year, Bakken drillers are drilling more holes in the same layer -- and venturing into other layers -- in search of a perfect oil-getting recipe. Graphic courtesy of Continental Resources Inc. Used with permission.
Getting more oil takes innovation -- in both technology and technique. Then, to reach "manufacturing" scale, these tricks have to be applied across a play.

"The rock will always win," said Joseph Stanislaw, independent senior adviser for energy and sustainability at Deloitte. "The whole game is to keep the decline curve from happening. It's always going to happen, but slowing it down."

As the Bakken's largest acreage holder, Continental holds an unusual vantage point. Not only does it see many parts of the play, facing diverse rocks, it also counts on the Bakken for most of its production.

This year, the company hopes to wrap up seven downspacing pilot projects. The goal is a mass-production formula: a way to produce oil at the scale of a factory belting out cars or sweatshirts.

What would that look like? Warren Henry, the company's vice president for research and policy, says to imagine putting wine bottles in the refrigerator.

The fridge has shelves, like the Williston Basin. It has three shelves for the Bakken -- its upper, middle and lower tiers. Beneath that, there are four more shelves for the promising Three Forks formation.

The wine bottles slide in sideways -- like the "laterals" that bite into each level of the shale.

But unlike for chardonnay, placement is paramount. If each fridge is a 1,280-acre space, Continental wants to optimize how many bottles to use and where.

"How many wells do I need to efficiently harvest this 1,280-acre space?" Henry said. "Obviously, when wells cost $7.5 million to $8 million apiece, you don't want to drill 20 if you could only drill 16 for the same output. Or 16 when you could do 12."

Results are highly preliminary, Henry cautioned. But in one pilot project, wells are on track to be 50 percent more productive over their lifetimes than Continental's benchmark Bakken well.

"Ask me again in a year," he said.

Best or worst of times in the Bakken?

Whatever works, the neighbors are sure to find out. Whiting Petroleum Corp., Oasis Petroleum Inc. and Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp. are among those also experimenting with spacing. Sometimes, they're even cooperating on the same wells.

Henry said he expects the industry to eventually suss out six to eight "recipes" for harvesting the play.

"Is the play eventually going to decline? Sure it is," he said. "But not in the next 10 to 15 years."

The new techniques have Bakken boosters believing the play has many years left, even with current technology. EOG has said it has eight years of drilling inventory left in the Bakken, even without advances in technology or spacing.

Drillinginfo, an industry data merchant, estimates that overall production can grow for another decade or two -- even assuming that production stays within a few counties and technology makes no leaps.

"But what you're likely to see is that as production continues to grow up, the explosiveness of the growth is going to decrease," said Kevin Thuot, an engineering research analyst.

"We don't really know whether we're in the best of the Bakken or in the worst of the Bakken. And you sort of won't know that until you drill it," said John Fierstien, vice president of product management.

More shifts ahead

Technology optimists say that even if the rock always wins, the oil industry has a habit of discovering a new trick sooner or later.

When it does, that can radically shift how much oil the country thinks it has.

Last April, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the Bakken and Three Forks to hold 4.4 billion to 11.4 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil.

In 2008, USGS had estimated 3 billion to 4.3 billion for the Bakken -- a figure that was itself a 25-fold increase on its 1995 estimate.

Pete Stark, senior director and advisor for upstream research at IHS, believes industry can keep raising the number.

"Currently the industry may recover only 4 to 8 percent of the oil in place," he said by email. "Ten years from now we will recover 12 to 16 percent of the oil in place."

New techniques mean a "sweet spot" lasts much longer than it used to, he said. And down the road, drillers can apply horizontal drilling to "ratty" reservoirs that were abandoned decades ago.

"Many moving parts in this and we are only in the first inning of a nine-inning game," he said.

http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059996282

[heironymouspasparagus]

I'm not moving any farther North than Bixby.  ND is w-a-y too cold for me in the winter.

Bixby is way too cold in the winter!!

[guido911]

We have a floundering economy, high unemployment, high numbers of people that have quit looking for jobs, etc. And I link to story where jobs are, and people b!tch about the weather. If you do not have a job, and you have yourself and your family to support, you might, gulp, have to be a little, itsy bit uncomfortable. And not all jobs are outdoors up there. Lots of trucking jobs, and some employers are willing to throw in housing assistance.