Bakken Shale

As industry players continue to expand their ability to move North Dakota’s Bakken crude oil via rail, state officials on Monday were making final plans for a public hearing and eventual rulemaking regarding crude-by-rail shipments.

Denver-based SM Energy Co. raised its production guidance for 2014 in spite of an anticipated hiccup in the company’s Eagle Ford Shale operations during the third quarter. The company also will be spending more than planned earlier.

With the advent of increased drilling on Montana’s portion of the Bakken Shale play and more importantly other wildcatting areas of the state, a new state program for temporary leasing of water rights has kicked off, anticipating added demand for water supplies to support hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

Concerns about activity on Native American reservation lands and a major processing plant’s bottleneck kept North Dakota’s wellhead associated natural gas flaring from falling in June, and the state’s top oil/gas regulator expressed some frustration Friday about that in reporting a 5% uptick in oil and gas production for the most recently completed reporting period, June.

Bakken crude oil rail shipments traverse 32 of North Dakota’s 53 counties on a weekly basis, and some counties have up to 45 crude-bearing trains pass through their boundaries weekly, according to a white paper released Thursday by an analyst at Genscape, the commodity and energy markets data gathering firm.

The use of natural gas for power generation in the Lower 48 is expected to increase to 1.6 billion megawatt hours (MWh) by 2040, a 1.3% average annual increase, in part due to development of several shale plays, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

As the industry moves along its steep learning curve dealing with the shale revolution, it is becoming clearer there is no real comparison between California’s Monterey Shale and North Dakota’s Bakken Shale. They are night-and-day opposites, according to several industry speakers at a hydraulic fracturing (fracking) conference Tuesday in Los Angeles.

U.S. Energy Corp. (USEC) saw an uptick in production during the second quarter of 2014, as it acquired a stake in production in South Texas and sold some of its assets in the Williston Basin.

Oasis Petroleum Inc. said it expects “meaningful production growth” through the remainder of 2014 and plans to expand its slickwater program in the Bakken Shale and Three Forks formation, after observing increased uplift from wells using the technique there.