Oilsands and Bakken Developments

The bottom line here is that a revolution in completion technology is changing everything in the oil industry.

We commonly have drilled through multiple formations bearing hydro carbon content and then completed on what appeared to be best. Suddenly it has become possible to achieve multiple completions in the same well. I am not sure yet what this means. On vertical wells pressure and water issues usually narrowed the options. However on horizontal wells this should be ameliorated.

The Bakken is all about fracturing and nifty completion technology. The same is true for gas shale. These are indications that the industry is making huge advances over past practice.

Also note the Bakken is at 10,000 feet and that only a few are been drilled at a time and cannot be compared to the thousands of much shallower shale gas wells been drilled.

Now if we could find a way to access those bypassed hydrocarbons we might be onto something big. Obviously the big thick zones (over 200 feet here) are the low lying fruit for the industry. However, imagine running a horizontal on the basement of an oil rich Mississippian sand, mapped to maximize gravity feed and enhanced with nitrogen injection. Those reserves are huge but the lack of a gas drive has produced wells able to make a barrel a day. A thousand meters of this oil behind pipe should happily make a thousand barrels for a century or so.
Recent developments suggest that we may not be too far off.

Update on the Oilsands, Bakken, Bakken-Three Forks and Oil and Gas Drilling Technolgy

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/07/update-on-oilsands-bakken-bakken-three.html

Oilsand Slower Growth and Lower Costs

Suncor expects its [oilsand] capital costs to decline by as much as 20 per cent from the peak of 2008 when it resumes oil sands expansion after its merger with Petro-Canada, which is expected to close this fall.

Oil sands producers faced increasing bottlenecks in accessing pipelines and a lack of refining capacity at the height of the boom last year. A moderate development schedule will allow time for pipeline companies to complete their expansions, and refiners to reconfigure their plants to handle the Alberta bitumen.

Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers at the height of the boom predicted oil sands production would grow to 3.5 million barrels a day by 2015. It has since revised that forecast to between 1.9 million and 2.2 million barrels a day.

Bakken - Three Forks : Possible New Oil Formation

Recent production results from 103 newly tapped wells in the Three Forks-Sanish formation show many that are "as good or better" than some in the Bakken, which lies two miles under the surface in western North Dakota and holds billions of barrels of oil.

The Bakken formation encompasses some 25,000 square miles within the Williston Basin in North Dakota and Montana. The U.S. Geological Survey has called it the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed.

The Three Forks-Sanish formation is made up of sand and porous rock directly below the Bakken shale. But geologists don't know whether the Three Forks-Sanish is a separate oil-producing formation or if it catches oil that flows from the Bakken shale above.Fort Worth, Texas-based XTO Energy Inc. has reported to the state that one of its Three Forks wells pulled more than 2,100 barrels a day.

State and industry officials are conducting a study to determine whether the Three Forks is a unique reservoir. The plan is to compare results from closely spaced wells, one aiming for the Three Forks, and the other at the Bakken. Researchers will look at pressure changes in the formations to determine if they are connected.

Results from the study could be ready later this year, officials say. It already is spurring some speculation that the state has billions of barrels more in oil reserves.

"Eventually it could equal the Bakken, which is remarkable, and that's an understatement," Helms said.
"Is it the same or is it a separate formation? I think everybody is hoping for the latter," Harms said. "That could literally double the potential we have — a Bakken 2, if you will."

Kelso, of Whiting Petroleum, said his company's drilling activity shows that Three Forks likely is a separate formation. He said core samples taken from the Bakken and Three Forks show more hydrocarbons in the latter.
"From the core samples, Three Forks looks better for us than the Bakken," he said.Promising production results from the Three Forks could mean that companies that come up empty in the Bakken could use existing leases to drill in the same area for Three Forks oil.Geologists say the Three Forks-Sanish is typically about 250 feet thick. Julie LeFever, a geologist with the state Geological Survey in Grand Forks, has studied the Bakken for two decades. She believes oil found in the Three Forks-Sanish has come from the Bakken over millions of years.

Packers Plus MultiStage Drilling

Packers Plus's multistage fracturing drilling technology has opened up major new supply basins in Canada and the United States, potentially unlocking hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of new gas reserves in places like Horn River, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and even Quebec.

Where analysts once warned of looming gas shortages and the need for massive imports from offshore, now they're complaining of a popped gas bubble that has driven prices to decade lows, down more than 75 per cent from last summer. Some say $10 is a distant memory, never to return.

Three years ago, Packers could insert a half-dozen or so "stages" into a single well. As horizontal wells got longer, that number has grown to 22, and Themig says new advancements will allow virtually "unlimited" stages in a single well. That, in turn, has resulted in an order-of-magnitude higher production for a basic well that costs only about twice as much to drill.

The average conventional gas well in Western Canada produces about 250,000 cubic feet of gas a day. EnCana Corp. CEO Randy Eresman said in releasing the company's second-quarter results this week that its latest Horn River wells that use the multistage technology are coming on at initial rates of up to 11 million cubic feet per day.

Note: this is a misleading implied comparison. avg production is long after the well has been stabalized and run for a long time. Initial production is often very high and makes a great press release but is totally misleading as to final production.

Drilling results from the new shale basins are just starting to trickle in, but reserve replacement south of the border seems to validate the notion that fewer wells are producing more gas, even in the midst of a downturn.

American gas reserves grew almost 40 per cent last year and production in the Lower 48 states posted the biggest increase since the Eisenhower years, mostly due to new fracture technology. In June, the U. S. Potential Gas Committee issued a report that suggested more than a third of new gas reserves--some 600 trillion cubic feet--are found in shales that need extensive stimulation to be productive. According to Ziff Energy, Canada replaced about 91 per cent of production, even as producers slashed drilling to decade lows.And that could be the tip of the iceberg. Eresman said North America now has enough gas to last a century at current consumption rates.

One of the earliest converts to Packers was Petrobank Energy, which used the technology to create a dominant position in the Bakken oil play. Like shale gas in northeast B. C., rocks in southeast Saskatchewan require the same drilling techniques to make the oil flow, according to Gregg Smith, the company's chief operating officer. Three years ago, the company was producing 100 barrels a day from the unconventional oil play. Today that number is around 17,000.

Brigham Exploration in Bakken, Three Forks Using Multistage Drilling

The editors of the Oil & Gas journal Newsletter reported on July 16 that oil and gas producers are quickly learning how to improve oil recovery in the Bakken and Three Forks formations in the Williston basin.

Brigham Exploration Company reports continuing reductions in drilling and completion costs. The company is now using up to 24 stages in long laterals. The Strobeck 27-34 in Mountrail County, North Dakota flowed 1,788 bbl/day of crude oil and 1.2 million cubic feet/day of natural gas. The well, completed in the Three Forks, had 18 effective fracture stages. The well also confirmed core results from the Anderson 28-33 which showed that both the upper Three Forks and the middle Bakken were oil saturated. Completed well cost was $3.9 million, 33% less than similar wells drilled in 2008.

The average horizontal well was expected to recover between 600,000 and 800,000 barrels over a 15 year well life. Some time will have to elapse before it will be possible to extrapolate production curves from long lateral wells far enough into the future to make an educated guess about ultimate recovery. Based on experience in the Middle East, ultimate recovery could be in the millions of barrels/well. Bakken basin crude oil sells at a $5/bbl discount to Nymex traded light crude. At $40/bbl (according to a report in the latest Oil & Gas Financial Journal), profit on a well that cost $5.5 million can be $24/bbl. Now, with crude oil trading at $60/bbl, profit should be considerably higher.

Bone Healing Halved

The incredible promise of stem cell therapy is been slowly realized. This is also surely the royal road for managing osteoporosis. That disease may well be a deficiency of stem cell stimulation particularly since it is known that regular exercise helps reverse the disease. Physical exercise always strengthens bones.

All we know from this is that serendipity stepped in and showed us a valuable pathway. Speeding bone healing is always a good thing and doing it for the aged will save lives and reduce suffering big time.

Recent work using stem cells to fabricate heart tissue on a framework shows us were this is all going.

We can anticipate the insertion into the body of a replacement organ or even bone using a collagen framework that is then bathed with appropriate stem cells. They are doing just that in the lab and we will shortly be trying it out on humans.

Thus we can expect surgery to be reduced to the removal of tissue and shaping of the insertion area before a replacement collagen framework is placed in the areas. Stem cells then rebuild a natural organ in that location.
We can also expect major scar tissue to quietly become a thing of the past.

The convincing experiments have been undertaken over the past year and I am expecting to see plenty of more reports.

By the way, I do not think it has happened yet. But what I have just described successfully applied to cases in which nerves are damaged or destroyed means the end of permanent disability, an amazing economic health benefit.

I would say that it is not too much to ask that by 2020, that all mechanical damage conditions will be curable. And since the human organism is good for about one hundred years at least, a lot of folks alive today will join a rising cohort of centenarians.

April 14, 2009

Enhancing Stem Cell Production for Miraculous Bone Healing in Less than Half the Time
The drug teriparatide, or Forteo, which was approved by the FDA in 2002 for the treatment of osteoporosis appear to also boost bone stem cell production for "miraculous bone healing".
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/04/enhancing-stem-cell-production-for.html

Astute observations led a team of clinicians and researchers to uncover how this drug can also boost our bodies' bone stem cell production to the point that adults' bones appear to have the ability to heal at a rate typically seen when they were young kids.

"The decreased healing time is significant, especially when fractures are in hard-to-heal areas like the pelvis and the spine, where you can't easily immobilize the bone - and stop the pain," Bukata added. "Typically, a pelvic fracture will take months to heal, and people are in extreme pain for the first eight to 12 weeks. This [healing] time was more than cut in half; we saw complete pain relief, callus formation, and stability of the fracture in people who had fractures that up to that point had not healed."

When a fracture occurs, a bone becomes unstable and can move back and forth creating a painful phenomenon known as micromotion. As the bone begins healing it must progress through specific, well-defined stages. First, osteoclasts - cells that can break down bone - clean up any fragments or debris produced during the break. Next, a layer of cartilage - called a callus - forms around the fracture that ultimately calcifies, preventing the bony ends from moving, providing relief from the significant pain brought on by micromotion.

Only after the callus is calcified do the bone forming cells - osteoblasts - begin their work. They replace the cartilage with true bone, and eventually reform the fracture to match the shape and structure of the bone into what it was before the break.

According to Puzas, teriparatide significantly speeds up fracture healing by changing the behavior and number of the cartilage and the bone stem cells involved in the process.
"Teriparatide dramatically stimulates the bone's stem cells into action," Puzas said. "As a result, the callus forms quicker and stronger. Osteoblasts form more bone and the micromotion associated with the fracture is more rapidly eliminated. All of this activity explains why people with non-healing fractures can now return to normal function sooner."

I had patients with severe osteoporosis, in tremendous pain from multiple fractures throughout their spine and pelvis, who I would put on teriparatide," said Bukata. "When they would come back for their follow-up visits three months later, it was amazing to see not just the significant healing in their fractures, but to realize they were pain-free - a new and welcome experience for many of these patients."
Bukata began prescribing teriparatide to patients with non-healing fractures, and was amazed at her findings: 93 percent showed significant healing and pain control after being on teriparatide for only eight to 12 weeks. And in the lab, Puzas began to understand how teriparatide stimulates bone stem cells into action.