For long-term archive purposes, here is a timeframe for the Bakken boom.
6/28 – The Million Dollar Way – The Bakken Is In Its Manufacturing Stage – Bruce Oksol provides a useful long-term perspective on how Bakken production has developed:
2000: the Bakken boom begins in Montana
2007: the Bakken boom begins in North Dakota
2012: the Bakken hits its stride
early 2014: the Bakken setting new records, almost every month
late 2014: the Saudi Surge
2015: the Bakken re-trenches
1Q16 taxable sales 50% greater than 1Q10
mid-2016: the Bakken bottoms out — at least that is what the tea leaves suggest
For more perspective, here is the average daily production for each of the above years. I calculated the following from data pulled from the state website: Continue reading “Timeline of Bakken oil production”
Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com before they closed their doors.
The massive volumes of change you see surrounding you everywhere you look isn’t going to stop. In fact the pace of change is going to increase.
Each of us have a choice. Either figure out how to cope with and embrace the change or ignore it.
The cost of ignoring massive change is that you and your organization will get left behind. That doesn’t just mean you will be a laggard as you continue doing next month what you did last year. Instead that means your organization will radically shrink and before you know it, will disappear.
The downsides are serious. There is an upside and it is exciting.
Four articles I’ve seen lately focus the mind. While these articles are written in either the accounting or church context, they also fully apply in the church and accounting context. They also apply to every individual and organization.
This article will be posted across all my blogs because it applies to all of them.
The odds are really high that tax preparation will be completely automated in the next two decades. Estimated odds are almost as high that both accounting and auditing will be fully automated.
Consider my business and my core tasks of auditing charities. There is a real possibility those types of audits could be heavily automated in 10 or 15 or 20 years. I am not old enough to bank on retiring before that massive change starts eating away the entire audit profession.
Automation will take over an increasing number of tasks. The world of tax, accounting, and audit will be affected. Mr. Sheridan explains the shelf life of education and experience we have is shrinking.
As the Maryland Association of CPAs routinely points out our learning needs to be greater than the rate of change; L>C is their formula.
Natural gas turbine power plant. Replacement power source for 75% of the electricity from Diablo Canyon nuclear plants. Photo courtesy of Adobe Stock.
PG&E agrees to close Diablo Canyon in 2025. San Luis Obispo Tribunereports on 6/21 that PG&E decided not to apply for another 20 year license and will close the two nuclear reactors in 2025.
The massive loss of electricity generation capacity will be replaced by intermittent renewables, both solar and wind. At least that is the company line being feed to the public.
These are the last nuclear power plants in California after San Onofre closed in 2012.
The Diablo Canyon facility provides 9% of the power that is generated in the state. One out of every ten watts.
Multi-well pad being drilled in Williston. Photo by James Ulvog.
Yesterday’s post on multi-well pad drilling saw lots of visitors from The Million Dollar Way. Bruce Oksol linked to the post in his discussion, Multi-Well Pad Drilling In The Bakken.
He has discussed this pad before. See his post for links.
Mr. Oksol links to a photo of the site taken by Vern Whitten: Vern Whitten Fall Portfolio. Since I try really hard to avoid copyright violations, you won’t see his photo on this blog. Instead you can see Mr. Whitten’s photo at this link. It is photo 28 of 39.
View from the highway that caught my interest. That is a lot of wells. Photo by James Ulvog.
One of many ways energy wizards are driving down the cost of drilling for oil is putting multiple wells on one site.
7/4 – Amy Dalrymple at Dickinson Press – Bakken multi-well pads getting bigger– The technique of drilling several wells from one site, called multi-padmulti-wellpad drilling, is increasing. Both the number of pads and the number of wells per pad is going up.
For several years now I have noticed multiple pump jacks on one site.
In September 2015, I saw a 15 well pad. It is a few miles west of Ross and about a mile and a half north of highway 2. You can see it on Google maps at coordinates 48.333785, -102.653962, although the satellite photo is really old. It shows only the middle six wells with pumps installed and a drilling rig working on the west row of wells. No progress on the east row of wells.
Here are three more stories in just the last week proving yet again the foolish of Malthusian thinking. The experts in a field have no clue, absolutely no clue, of the total amount of any resource available on this amazing planet. Whether it is water, crude oil, or helium, the experts don’t know what previously unknown field they will find next.
The new field, called Liza, likely has somewhere between 800M and 1.4B oil-equivalent barrels. Yeah, that’s somewhere in the range of one and a half billion barrels of oil. That nobody knew about. Until now.
To put this in context, there have been only five brand-new discoveries in the last four years with recoverable amounts of over 500M barrels. Only five? ONLY? To my little brain that is astounding.
Crew camp on north side of Williston that the city wants to shut down. Photo by James Ulvog.
Looks like the Williston City Commission is in deeper trouble on the crew camp issue.
Judge Hovland issued a preliminary injunction against the city’s rule to close all the man camps because he found it likely the city violated its own rules in passing the ordinance. Specifically, it is likely the ordinance should have received a super-majority vote of 4-1 under the city’s own rules.
Now, writer Rob Port has received a written opinion from the state Attorney General that the city commissioners violated the state open meeting law in their efforts to find a way to shut down the camps.
There is another hint of a whiff in the air that completion work in North Dakota may be picking up.
Federal injunction postpones shutting down all the crew camps within reach of the Williston City Commissioners. Hint of pushback from commissioners since the crew camps are now unlicensed.
Flaring in North Dakota has dropped dramatically in the last two years.
(Have you noticed Amy Dalrymple is the author of a large portion of the interesting reporting in North Dakota?)
You can carry around hundreds upon hundreds of books inside that little device. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
I have long been amused by the way class-action lawsuits are settled. The members of the group receive very little and often it is a credit for your next purchase of the same item. At the same time, the attorneys involved get a huge payout.
One settlement I recall gave members of the class a coupon worth a few hundred dollars off their next purchase of a brand-new automobile. Since very few people will run right out and buy a new car that means very few of those coupons will ever be redeemed. In the meantime the attorney lucky enough to claim credit for the lawsuit walks off with millions upon millions of dollars.
Not much that I’ve noticed in the news about regulation of the recreational marijuana market. Here are a few things of interest. Reminder: Reason I’m following this issue is to watch a natural experiment on whether over-regulation will crush a new industry.
How the marijuana laws have developed, the Department of Justice’s effort to look the other way when states have legalized either medical or recreational marijuana, and the IRS’ stand that most costs of running a marijuana business are non-deductible.
Also, some discussion on how likely Congress is to make changes to federal law. Current assessment: not likely. Doing so would appear to be soft on crime. Current mess with opioid abuse would make any efforts to legalize marijuana appear to be bad.
6/16 – MarketWatch – Microsoft gets into the weed business – One of the requirements in those states where recreational marijuana is legal is the need to track every bit of marijuana from the seed that germinated into a plant all the way to the specific end product the marijuana went into.
The economic devastation and human suffering in Venezuela is getting worse by the day. Every article I see shows the economy has taken one more step towards utter collapse.
6/9 – Washington Post – As hunger mounts, Venezuelans turned to trash for food – A man who used to work at a bakery now searches garbage cans for food because he will starve if he doesn’t find something to eat in the trash.
He is joined by small business owners and retired people in the search for enough food to merely stay alive.
Number of people below the poverty line has skyrocketed from 52% as recently as 2014 up to 76% today.
I wonder what could have caused that devastation?
In the 535 word article, the only hint of the reason for this human suffering is citing the government’s claim that the political opposition is intentionally causing this suffering in order to throw the president out of power.
While the WP reporters are incapable of seeing the cause, at least they are able to see the suffering.
Construction of the above is four times as expensive as natural gas, but at least this won’t incinerate birds. Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com
Million Dollar Way pointed me to EIA data for 2013 on the costs for construction and amount of new capacity for wind, solar, natural gas, hydro and biomass. As expected, the non-reliables have extremely high construction costs.
One more illustration of the energy revolution currently underway. BTW, flaring is down to 9.2% of all natural gas produced. About 91% is captured, which shows great progress. Photo by James Ulvog.
When I look at the political news and the headlines in general news every morning, I get so discouraged. When I look away from those areas I am so optimistic.
Consider what the two following articles suggest about how bright our economic future could be: an abundant supply of oil and gas at increasingly lower cost to produce.
6/13 – JH at The American Interest – Resilient Shale Producers Get Their Second Wind – Article mentions a Financial Times article which indicates there is some increase in drilling, which is driven by prices a few weeks ago. Since then oil prices have come up further. Discussion speculates if prices remain in the $50 range there will be even more drilling.
The small-scale and short development time of shale wells creates a soft ceiling on prices. Shale production can increase quickly which will put supplies on the market quickly, which will counter a surge in prices.
A quoted analyst says his expectation is a long-term price of oil around $60. There will be fluctuations up to $80 and down to $40, but the price will tend toward $60. Drillers needing a price higher than that to be profitable will have a rough time.
Whether a boom time or slow down, all the oil activity has disrupted life in North Dakota. Photo by James Ulvog.
Two reports on the issue of whether transitory housing will remain in Williston: one court case closed with one remaining; city allows another year and a half to remove the camps.
Young guys who moved to North Dakota and decided to stay have brought their wifes to the area and guess what? Lots of them are having babies. By the way, our son is in that category, our daughter-in-law is someone who moved as well, and our grandson is one of the following statistics.
Finally, an indicator why people in North Dakota don’t like all the changes. I get it. Really, I get it: there are ugly sides to economic expansion.
6/8 – Amy Dalrymple at Oil Patch Dispatch – Williston Wins One Crew Camp Court Case, Another Looms – There are two cases and process against the city’s plan to shut down all crew camps. The case in state court has ended with the judge refusing to issue an injunction.
