Wilsons Sandbox

A shale formation stretching North Dakota and Montana may have an estimated 3 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, according to a U.S. Geological Survey assessment. Known as the Bakken Formation, the find would make the recoverable oil in North Dakota and Montana the largest U.S. oil reserves outside Alaska. The recently released assessment shows a 2,800 percent, or 28-times increase in the amount of oil recoverable from the Bakken Formation, compared to the agency's 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil. According to the USGS, the dramatically increased estimate of recoverable oil in the Bakken Formation results from new geological models, advances in drilling and production technologies, and recent oil discoveries. By the end of 2007, approximately 105 million barrels of oil had been produced from the Bakken Formation. "The Bakken Formation estimate is larger than all other current USGS oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest 'continuous' oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS," said a news release making the announcement. The Bakken Formation lies in "Williston Basin," a geological formation in the north central U.S., underlying much of North Dakota, eastern Montana, northwestern South Dakota, and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada, according to the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy. The EIA says the success of horizontal drilling and fracturing efforts in Montana is the reason a decision was made to re-evaluate the 1995 USGS Assessment of Resources that had estimated only 151 million barrels were technically recoverable from the Bakken Formation. Lynn Helms, director of the oil and gas division of North Dakota's Industrial Commission told the Grand Forks Herald the USGS announcement had prompted new interest from investment bankers and the oil industry. "We have had contacts from Scotland and Australia today," Helms told the newspaper. "And of course, lots of Canadian interest, and contacts from across the United States, both from the media and the oil industry. And banks. I think they are looking for a place to invest venture capital." The USGS announcement should give "a significant boost to North Dakota's already-booming oil industry," according to a news release from the office of North Dakota's Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan. "The oil industry in North Dakota has already seen substantial growth," Dorgan said, "but this report is important, because it gives oil companies another set of eyes." "The Bakken Shale should attract significant new investment to this region," he continued. "This is an exciting time for North Dakota's oil industry. We're going to see new growth that will boost our economy and help our country shed its dependence on foreign oil." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- After three years of clandestine development, a Georgia company is now going public with a simple, natural way to convert anything that grows out of the Earth into oil. J.C. Bell, an agricultural researcher and CEO of Bell Bio-Energy, Inc., says he's isolated and modified specific bacteria that will, on a very large scale, naturally change plant material - including the leftovers from food - into hydrocarbons to fuel cars and trucks. "What we're doing is taking the trash like corn stalks, corn husks, corn cobs - even grass from the yard that goes to the dump - that's what we can turn into oil," Bell told WND. "I'm not going to make asphalt, we're only going to make the things we need. We're going to make gasoline for driving, diesel for our big trucks." The agricultural researcher made the discovery after standing downwind from his cows at his food-production company, Bell Plantation, in Tifton, Ga. "Cows are like people that eat lots of beans. They're really, really good at making natural gas," he said. "It dawned on me that that natural gas was methane." Bell says he wondered what digestive process inside a cow enabled it to change food into the hydrocarbon molecules of methane, so he began looking into replicating and speeding up the process. "Through genetic manipulation, we've changed the naturally occurring bacteria, so they eat and consume biomass a little more efficiently," he said. "It works. There's not even any debate that it works. It really is an all-natural, simple process that cows use on a daily basis." But does he think it will make environmentalists happy? "They love this. We had one totally recognizable environmentalist from Hollywood say this is everything they ever had hoped for," Bell said. "This could be considered the ultimate recycling of carbon. We are using the energy of the sun through the plant. We're not introducing any new carbon [to the environment]." The research has received strong support from the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture and committees in both chambers of Congress, and Bell plans further discussions in Washington, D.C., next week. He expects to have the first pilot plant for the process running within two to three months, and will operate it for a year to collect engineering data to design full-scale production facilities. He thinks the larger facilities will be producing oil "inside the next two years." And just how much oil is in Bell's bio-forecast? "With minor changes in the agricultural and forestry products, we could create two to two and a half billion tons of biomass a year, and you're looking at 5 billion barrels of oil per year. That would be about two-thirds of what we use now." Turning some of nature's produce into energy has been done for years, especially when it comes to the conversion of corn and cellulose-based products into ethanol, used to extend gasoline volume and boost octane. The Energy Information Administration says in 2005, total U.S. ethanol production was 3.9 billion gallons, or 2.9 percent of the total gasoline pool. Bell admits his bacterial breakthrough has been kept under wraps until now, but he plans to explain it all once his website is fully operational. "We're actually gonna tell people how we do it, with streaming video. We're to the point now with our patent that we can say more and we fully intend to. "We want to develop public support so they can understand what we're doing; to develop political support, because this is a combination of making the United States more independent from foreign oil sources; make [the country] healthier from an economic point of view; and it goes a long way to solving the environmental problems a lot of people are concerned about." When asked why he thought no one else has patented this process, Bell answered, "It literally is because it's too simple. Everyone was looking for a real complicated mechanism. We looked at how it occurs naturally. But it's now going to develop in a hurry." Recalling other great inventions, Bell cited on another person with his last name. "Alexander Graham Bell put together stuff that was already on the shelf and made a phone. I don't want to compare myself to the great inventors. I'm not there yet, but to be able to look at simple things and create things from them, that's how we think in this company." [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

FWIW, I just got back from a weekend of riding in the North Dakota Badlands along the Little Missouri and near Teddy Roosevelt National Park. Even outside the park, this is beautiful country. There are pump jacks all over the place, but strangely, they do not seem to blight the landscape. The pumping installations are very tidy, unlike many you see in Texas, which are littered with, pipe, sucker rod, and junky-looking machinery. A typical installation sits on a graded pad, and includes a large pump jack, some storage tanks, and some kind of service shed, all painted in earth tones. No junk anywhere to be seen. The neatness is kind of eerie, but the overall effect is not bad. I hate to see a real wilderness like ANWR opened up to drilling, but if it is kept as neat as the installations I saw, I guess it will not be the end of the world.