North Dakota’s growing prosperity continues to be on full display for the world this month. As we wrote previously, the state’s freedom to drill for oil has made it the 2nd largest producer of oil in the U.S. Recently, a North Dakota oil official publicly predicted that the state could come close to doubling current oil production to 1 million barrels per day …
North Dakota Chooses Oil Production
The shale revolution has resulted in North Dakota becoming the 2nd largest oil producing state, passing both Alaska and California this year. Below is the most recent data (February) from the Energy Information Administration, which highlights the powerful up trending production from both Texas and North Dakota. Alaska and California’s declines are even more startling when one considers that these states …
Vermont’s Hypocritical Ban on Hydraulic Fracturing
On Wednesday May 16th, 2012 Governor Peter Shumlin signed H. 464 which outlawed hydraulic fracturing in his state. The governor failed to mention that he was banning a technology which would never have been utilized because Vermont has no oil and gas reserves. He claimed that “this is a job creator” and had his picture taken with a sign that …
The Shale Revolution: Fueling U.S. Productivity
In Fracing Amazing: The Story of the Eagle Ford Shale, I explained how innovations in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing of once-useless source rock unlocked the Eagle Ford Shale formation. Here are some other developments in the growing Shale Revolution in oil and gas production. Natural gas production is so prolific that the price of this clean form of energy …
Kern River and Hydraulic Fracturing
In 1899, eight men dug a 70 foot deep well by hand, creating the first oil well in Kern River, Kern County, California. Many wells and hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil followed, and by WWII it was estimated that there were still another 54 million barrels of oil in reserve. By 1986, technology had developed and the field had been made to produce 740 million …
Fracing Amazing: The Story of the Eagle Ford Shale
As President Obama observed in his 2012 State of the Union Address, “American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years.” This is truly exciting news. Just five years ago, US oil production was on a multi-decade decline that was widely expected to be terminal. Then, all of a sudden, production began booming–and today we are producing …