Category: Shale Oil

Sign image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission> The fracking of oil and gas less than a mile from aquifers or the Earth’s surface now takes place across North America with few restrictions, posing increased risk for drinking water supplies, says a new Stanford study . The study examined the frequency of so-called shallow fracking, described by the researchers as occurring less than a mile underground. Shallow fracking poses a greater risk to drinking water than fracking that occurs much deeper under the Earth’s surface. Out of 44,000 wells fracked between 2010 and 2013 in the United States, researchers found that 6,900 (16 per cent) were fractured less than a mile from the surface and another 2,600 wells (six per cent) were fractured above 3,000 feet, or 900 metres. "What surprised me is how often shallow fracturing occurs with large volumes of chemicals and water," said lead researcher […]

Click here to view full article at www.resilience.org

Halliburton SandCastle PS-2500 trailers, which store sand for hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, stand at a Hess well site near Williston, North Dakota November 12, 2014. U.S. oil companies, under renewed pressure from falling crude prices, are increasingly tweaking and mixing fracking technologies as they scramble to squeeze more out of wells and eke out profits after rounds of cost-cutting. Shale oil firms need the experiments to payoff now more so than before given that oil prices have resumed their slide to trade around $49 per barrel this week from $60 a few months ago. Quarterly earnings – and the reams of data that accompany them – throughout the next few weeks will offer Wall Street the first opportunity to assess those efforts and pick potential winners and losers. When oil fetched $100 a barrel and profits were fatter, most companies followed a similar script. Now, many try […]

Click here to view full article at www.reuters.com

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The Oklahoma Corporation Commission says two oil and gas wastewater injection wells are shutting down and one is reducing operations in the Crescent area following several earthquakes. The commission said Tuesday that Stephens Production and Devon Energy are each voluntarily closing one well. Also, Stephens is reducing operations at another well by 50 percent. Earthquakes in the area recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey on Monday and Tuesday include two of magnitude 4.5 and one of magnitude 4.1. The commission recently announced plans to place more than 200 disposal wells under scrutiny as it investigates whether they are triggering earthquakes in the state. An Oklahoma Geological Survey report in April says it’s "very likely" most of the state’s recent earthquakes were triggered by the injection of wastewater from the wells.

Click here to view full article at hosted.ap.org

A Exxon Mobil gas station is seen in Encinitas, California October 28, 2014. A subsidiary of Exxon Mobil Corp donated $5 million on Monday to a North Dakota government housing fund that subsidizes construction of low-cost apartments for teachers and emergency personnel in the state’s oil patch. XTO Energy will receive a 100 percent tax write-off for its donation to the North Dakota Housing Incentive Fund, which will be used to construct more than 75 apartment units in Kildeer, Watford City and Williston, towns at the center of the state’s oil hub. North Dakota has had a hard time attracting teachers, police officers and firefighters into such towns due to the high cost of housing. The fund seeks to help alleviate that. "These are the communities our employees live in and we want to respect those communities," Tim McIlwain, XTO’s head of operations, told a news conference. The donation […]

Click here to view full article at www.reuters.com

The Philadelphia Energy Solutions oil refinery owned by The Carlyle Group is seen at sunset in Philadelphia March 26, 2014. Philadelphia Energy Solutions is pursuing a joint venture that would give the U.S. East Coast refiner greater control over its supply chain out of North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields, the company has disclosed in federal filings ahead of a initial public offering. PES, a joint venture partly owned by Carlyle Group LP, said in a filing that in early June, it entered into a preliminary agreement with Globe Resources Group, parent company of BOE Midstream. The deal would give PES controlling interest in a 210,000 barrel-per-day crude rail loading facility, nearly 1 million barrels of crude oil storage and a 39-mile pipeline in North Dakota. The Bakken rail terminal will serve the 335,000 bpd PES refinery complex in Philadelphia, the largest consumer of Bakken oil in the country. The […]

Click here to view full article at www.reuters.com

The plunge in oil prices last year led many to say that a decline in U.S. oil production wouldn’t be far behind. This was because almost all the growth in U.S. production in recent years had come from high-cost tight oil deposits which could not be profitable at these new lower oil prices. These wells were also known to have production declines that averaged 40 percent per year. Overall U.S. production, however, confounded the conventional logic and continued to rise– until early June when it stalled and then dropped slightly. Anyone who understood that U.S. drillers in shale plays had large inventories of drilled, but not yet completed wells, knew that production would probably rise for some time into 2015– even as the number of rigs operating plummeted. Shale drillers who are in debt–and most of the independents are heavily in debt–simply must get some revenue out of wells […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

A service truck drives past an oil well on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, November 1, 2014. U.S. oil producers added 21 oil rigs in the past week, the most in over a year, data showed on Friday, suggesting that drillers were moving more aggressively than expected, just before crude prices’ latest dive down. Oil producers, who cut rigs in the face of falling prices late last year, began to add rigs back in the week ending July 2, oil services company Baker Hughes Inc said in its closely followed report. The latest addition comes amid a 21 percent collapse in U.S. crude prices from a recent high in June, data showed on Friday. The rise in the rig count this week was the biggest increase since April 2014. It was, however, only the third addition over the past 33 weeks, bringing the total rig count […]

Click here to view full article at www.reuters.com

The US drilling rig count jumped 19 units to reach 876 during the week ended July 24, according to data from Baker Hughes Inc. The gains came primarily from rigs drilling on land. Land rigs were up 17 units to 841. Those drilling in inland waters also increased, up 2 units to reach 4 rigs working. During the week, rigs targeting oil jumped 21 units to 659. Gas-directed rigs, meanwhile, were down 2 units to 216. Rigs considered unclassified were unchanged at 1 rig working. Rigs engaged in horizontal drilling increased 12 units to 662. Directional drilling rigs lost 1 unit to 83. Rigs drilling offshore and in the Gulf of Mexico were both unchanged this week, both maintaining counts of 31. Canada’s rig count continued its upward climb, increasing 8 units to an even 200. Its count has now risen in 9 of the last 11 weeks. This […]

Click here to view full article at www.ogj.com