Pipelines for shipping oil in Canada keep getting cancelled or bought up and then pretend to be worked on.
But shipping oil by rail keeps rising.
Oil by rail is not as safe as a pipeline.
A pipeline is the safest and cheapest method to move oil; railway is the second cheapest way, he said.
“If you increase the amount of transportation, sooner or later you will have some incidents that will be happening,” Chen said.
What an amazing turnaround. From 14 million bpd net imports to -211,000 bpd in 13 years.
For the first time in 75 years, the United States exported more oil than it imported, carrying out a pledge from President Trump that America can achieve “energy independence.”
While the U.S. has been a net oil importer since 1949, over the final week of November, U.S. net imports of crude oil and petroleum products fell to minus 211,000 barrels per day (bpd) — which means America exported more than it imported, according to data from U.S. Energy Information and Administration.
Oil production has been booming in the U.S. as the shale revolution swept the nation. America is now the world’s largest producer of petroleum, passing Russia and Saudi Arabia. As the U.S. oil boom spread, the power of OPEC was reduced and gas prices in the U.S. have dropped from the $4+ highs under former president Barack Obama.
Net imports peaked in 2005, topping 14 million bpd …
Wow. There is no shortage of oil in Texas and New Mexico!
Estimates Include 46.3 Billion Barrels of Oil, 281 Trillion Cubic feet of Natural Gas, and 20 Billion Barrels of Natural Gas Liquids in Texas and New Mexico’s Wolfcamp Shale and Bone Spring Formation.
I think it is insane for Canada to be importing foreign oil. Reviving Energy East Pipeline makes sense to me.
New Brunswick’s new premier working to bring Energy East pipeline back from the dead
FREDERICTON — New Brunswick’s new premier is trying to revive the Energy East pipeline — even though the original proponent says the project is dead.
TransCanada Corporation abandoned the $15.7-billion project more than a year ago, after the National Energy Board modified the environmental assessment process.
But Premier Blaine Higgs, along with some other premiers and federal politicians, are again pushing the proposed pipeline as a way to get more western crude to refineries in Eastern Canada and for export to foreign markets.
Ontario and Quebec have also new elected new premiers this year, and Higgs said he thinks Energy East could be viable.
“The fact that Ontario has said they’re not opposed to oil coming through the province, there’s a hurdle that’s now gone. We know that Manitoba and Saskatchewan are fine and we know Alberta is looking for a way out,” said Higgs.
“We see Alberta now taking a strong position with buying rail cars and saying we’ve got to get our oil to market because they’re losing $80 million a day.”
Higgs said he recognizes Quebec could still be a hurdle and he plans to discuss the project with Premier Francois Legault this week at a first ministers meeting in Montreal.”
A phrase I hadn’t heard before: Fractured Basement
From inside a ship, sloshing around the 65-foot waves off the coast of the Scottish isles, he plans to poke a diamond-tipped drill-bit into the sea bed. He’ll take it past layers of once-oil-soaked sandstone rocks straight into a strata of solid granite — what geologists call the basement. Then the drill will turn sideways and hopefully intersect a bunch of naturally formed cracks. If his science is correct, there will be enough oil pooled in those cracks to make him a very rich man.
…
Hurricane’s first wells suggested oil was present, but investors needed to see if it could flow. In 2014, right as the price of crude was plummeting off a cliff, Trice drilled a kilometer-long horizontal appraisal well into the Lancaster prospect.
Almost 10,000 barrels a day spouted out of the well. That’s not spectacular, but it was encouraging enough to move forward.
…
“I basically saw this as a missing opportunity,” said Trice in a phone call in September. “The very simple philosophy is that if fractured basement works around the world why couldn’t it work in the U.K.?”
And from a different article:
In most reservoirs, oil is held in pores in sedimentary rock such as sandstone. Basement rocks, which are usually found beneath, are different because they have been buried at great depth in the Earth earlier in their history, making them denser, so oil can’t move through them. The industry never believed that it would be commercially viable to extract oil from this kind of tightly-packed rock, so it was forgotten about in the search for more conventional reservoirs, often in untouched areas.
As the core was taken from rock which was more than half a kilometre from the nearest sedimentary layer, we realised that the sand must have been washed in from above during the Cretaceous period along a network of deep fractures that also channelled oil in from rocks west of the Rona Ridge.
So, wherever you find fractures in the Rona Ridge basement which are filled with minerals and sand, you always find oil. Fractures alone are not enough – it is the minerals and porous sand that hold open the fractures for tens of millions of years.
4 trillion barrels of oil in the Green River Found locked up in oil shale (not shale oil).
In Kearl’s playbook, you’d leave the kerogen in the ground and bring its oil to the surface. Producers would microwave oil shale formations with a beam as powerful as 500 household microwave ovens, cooking the kerogen and releasing the oil. It also would turn the water found naturally in the deposits to steam, which would help push the oil to the wellbore. “Once you remove the oil and water,” Kearl continues, “the rock basically becomes transparent” to the microwave beam, which can then penetrate outward farther and farther, up to about 80 feet from the wellbore. It doesn’t sound like much, but a single microwave-stimulated well, which would be drilled in formations on average nearly 1,000 feet thick, could pump about 800,000 barrels. Qmast plans to have its first systems deployed in the field in 2017 and start producing by the end of that year.
Just one shale formation could produce 25% of the UK’s oil. Isn’t this better than financing Russia or Saudi Arabia?
The so-called Gatwick Gusher, a shale basin in the United Kingdom, could add as much as $74 billion to the nation’s economy, a study finds.
U.K. Oil & Gas Investments commissioned Ernst & Young to examine the future potential of oil production from the Weald shale basin.
“Assuming it can be extracted from a development site at the volumes projected by U.K. Oil & Gas, has the potential to generate significant economic value to the U.K. economy,” the report read.
Oil & Gas U.K., the industry’s lobbying group, said the North Sea oil sector is in for a long period of decline, with less than $1.4 billion in new spending expected in 2016. Inland shale, meanwhile, has the potential to add between $10 billion and $74.6 billion to the British economy in gross value, the commissioned report said.
Operators are working to assess the potential in the shale area by testing the Horse Hill-1 oil discovery. Preliminary estimates made by the company last year put the entire Horse Hill reserve total as high as 100 billion barrels of oil. If its full potential is reached, the future production from the area could provide as much as a quarter of the nation’s total oil demand over its lifespan, based on 2014 demand levels.
There is oil to be moved. Obama has cancelled Keystone XL. So Warren Buffet and his railway the BNSF (and other railways) are stepping up and building thousands of miles of new track.
Right through the middle of cities.
“WATERTOWN — A Canadian Pacific train, with some cars carrying crude oil, derailed in Watertown on Sunday afternoon, November 8th — and dozens of homes were evacuated. Evacuated residents got word Sunday night that they would NOT be allowed back in their homes.”
Canadian Pacific: 13 rail cars derailed in Watertown; less than 1,000 gallons of crude oil leaked
Last week, under pressure from companies including Buffett’s BNSF Railway Co, which has spent more money lobbying Congress this year than any other railroad, U.S. legislators passed, and President Obama signed, a law that delays the so-called positive train control mandate for at least three years, with the possibility of an additional two-year delay.
That means railroad operators can put off having to buy and install equipment that safety advocates say would have prevented accidents that have claimed more than 245 lives and caused over 4,200 injuries since the National Transportation Safety Board began calling for the technology in 1969.”
There is oil to be moved. Obama and company keeps delaying approval of the Keystone XL. So Warren Buffet and his railway the BNSF (and other railways) are stepping up and building thousands of miles of new track.
Right through the middle of cities.
BNSF will make the following investments:
-$162 million to double track the rail line from Minot, N.D., to Glasgow, Mont., to help address major congestion issues for westbound traffic to destinations in the Pacific Northwest.
-$26 million to add sub sidings to address congestion from Fargo, N.D., to Grand Forks, N.D.
-$14 million to add sub sidings to address congestion from Fargo, N.D., to Glendive, Mont.
-$13 million to add sub sidings to address congestion from Minot, N.D., to Grand Forks, N.D.
-$13 million to add sub sidings and an interchange track to address congestion from Canada to the U.S.
-$11 million for centrailized traffic control to improve service from Bismarck, N.D., to Fargo, N.D.
-$8 million to add sub sidings and conduct signal work along track from Fargo, N.D., to Minot, N.D.
The company also recently issued a request for proposal to major rail-car manufacturers to submit bids for the construction of 5,000 next-generation tank cars used to move crude oil.
http://thebakken.com/articles/551/bnsf-plans-record-nd-investments-in-2014
sunshine hours 