Make no mistake about the motivations of the people drilling and producing oil in the Bakken formation, they are in it for the money, not to lower the price of gas for US consumers.
If my guesses about the source of the crude oil and trains hauling the tankcars are correct, then it goes west to Pasco, WA then south to the Los Angeles area.
My kind of folks!
What’s also nice is that a lot of the money earned by the folks drilling and producing will be spent in the US and provide tax revenues for local, state and federal governments. While production of oil from the Bakken formation may not lower prices (doesn’t make any sense to sell oil for less than it costs to produce), it will help prices from rising much higher.
Actually what you are seeing are ethanol cars from the mid-west. Living in the heart of corn country (Northwest Iowa) we see so many, they seem as thick as grain hoppers.
Dick
No, they are placarded 1267, which is crude oil.
I assure you that BNSF will not be shipping Bakken oil (western N.D., eastern Montana) to destinations in Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas via the West Coast. The unhelpful newspaper stories I have seen, and the BNSF’s own web site, are silent on the routing, but BNSF has lots of options east and then south.
It may very well be that current market prices are what makes exploiting the Bakken field financially viable.
Who said anything about shipping oil to OK, LA, or TX via the West Coast?
Has anyone heard if these new terminals will be set up to handle regular tankcars or Tank Train tankcars?
I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But then, market prices are what makes basically anything finacially viable. Whatever it is, it has to be worth more than it cost or it’s not gonna’ be financially viable.
For me, and I’ve been around for a while, the amazing thing is that this crude oil is moving through to destination by rail. In years gone by the oil would have gone into a barge at the closest river terminal. Either St. Paul or Sioux City. The government would have seen to that by forcing the through rail rate to be high enough to cause the transfer to barge.
They had the idea that they could allocate better than the market. Some of 'em still believe they can hold hearings, listen to lawyers present arguments, and do a better job than the market. They can’t.
I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But then, market prices are what makes basically anything finacially viable. Whatever it is, it has to be worth more than it cost or it’s not gonna’ be financially viable.
For me, and I’ve been around for a while, the amazing thing is that this crude oil is moving through to destination by rail. In years gone by the oil would have gone into a barge at the closest river terminal. Either St. Paul or Sioux City. The government would have seen to that by forcing the through rail rate to be high enough to cause the transfer to barge.
They had the idea that they could allocate better than the market. Some of 'em still believe they can hold hearings, listen to lawyers present arguments, and do a better job than the market. They can’t.
Bakke Crude is more expensive to get. I also hear stuff occasionally come up about the extraction of shale oil in Canada. Are we running out of oil? No, I really don’t believe so. But, are we running out of cheap, easy to extract oil? That may be the case. As all the “easy oil” gets used up oil companies will have no choice but to pursue the harder, more expensive to extract stuff.
Nobody, as I see upon review. I read carelessly – sorry.
Exactly. Bakken oil is great for us to have and it’s very clean and sweet, as others have mentioned in this thread. Think of aquifer water as opposed to sewer water. But the oil market influence itself will be negligible since the ability to extract this crude will depend entirely on the market prices.
The USGS estimates there may be 3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of “technically” recoverable Bakken oil in the U.S. “Technically,” because Bakken oil doesn’t lie in fields the same way as in many other places. It exists in fields of fractures in the bedrock. Geologists can only tell where the oil should be. Then they’ll drill, hoping to hit a fracture. If they succeed, then a reservoir of oil becomes available. But they could happen to drill just 20 feet away and never hit anything. As a result, even confirming fields will be expensive. And once a field has been confirmed, just establishing wells will be much more expensive because of this fracturing.
Right now they’ve been lucky to hit some well-fractured fields, but the drilling expenses will become greater the less fractured the fields are. And finally, as a method of extracting oil from the very poorly-fractured shale, they’ll have to shatter the bedrock themselves to create the fractures that they can then drill into. The technologies for this are prohibitively expensive at the moment because oil just isn’t worth enough yet.
On