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Message: <blockquote data-quote="raider" data-source="post: 148655" data-attributes="member: 353">as eye said above, the 2 reasons there were 200+ rigs here a few years ago was to "cover the leases"... to those who don't know, here is an explanation of that --- because of horizontal drilling, the state moved to "1280 spacing"... b4 horizontal drilling, an oil company would drill straight down and try to find a pocket of oil to extract... they would lease the minerals straight below the hole, generally from the 1 mineral owner who owned it (may be several because of inheritances over time, but just for the small area drilled on)... there were roads built out to every one of these remote locations going through whatever habitat they had to... because a drilling rig can now drill 2 miles down and 2 across, the state started to join these potential areas into spacing units... the normal spacing unit in the state is now 1 section (640 acres) wide (e & w) and 2 sections high (n&s), for a total of 1280 acres...  the 1280 acres are pooled and the individual mineral owners are each paid on their "cut", or percentage of the mineral acres owned in the spacing unit...  when individual mineral acres are leased by an oil company, the typical lease term is 3 years... if the lease expires without a well, the lease, or contract is over, and the oil companies will have to re-lease to have rights to drill there...  when horizontal technology, along with fracing came along, an area with a vertical well average of 25 barrels per day now had the potential of up to 5000 bpd, at least to start... the leasing went crazy as oil companies wanted to lease up as many acres as they could... once leased, they had to drill 1 well per spacing unit to tie it up... that unit is tied up and the oil company has rights to it until there is no longer a producing well on it... trouble was, during the boom, when that lease was tied up, the drilling rig was taken apart and hauled to the next location to start the whole process all over again... tons of extra trucking, time, road damage, accidents, yadda...  that has all changed now with "walking rigs" drilling as many as 40 wells on a pad without having to be taken apart and moved... huge difference now "filling in" the bakken field...the other reason for all the rigs was the price being at historic levels... gotta make hay when the sun shines... the leases are mostly tied up now, and companies are drilling many wells on a single location to cover the spacing unit by angling out from 1 central location... instead of having well sites sprinkled throughout 2 sections with roads to each pad, they (pads) are now within a couple hundred feet of main roads, drilling to a north spacing unit and a south spacing unit from the same pad...  the result of that is way less disturbance of ag land and habitat...  in areas with no old wells, the north south gap between well sites is now 4 miles... that in itself is a huge improvement, thanks to horizontal drilling... the only habitat lost is about a 500' strip on one side of east/west roads every 4 miles... nothing else is disturbed, other than pipeline runs, which is another subject on other threads... now, because the leases are generally covered, the oil companies are going back to the spacing units they drilled 1 well on to cover the leases and expanding pads to drill many more wells on them... basically "filling in"... but these will not extend beyond the ~ 500' off the road...  in my eyes, this was brilliant foresight by the state and oil companies for many obvious reasons, and makes this a far more environmentally friendly boom than any time b4 now... in the new bakken, if all spacing units were to be completely drilled out as narrowly spaced as they wanted, realize that the footprint of that would be 2.34% of the acreage that the oil is being drawn from...  there would be a 500' strip of pads every 4 miles, along the road... not exactly a huge habitat loss, with 60 of every 2560 acres being covered...  this is certainly not rape and pillage thinking...the reality of the boom is you cannot control legal behavior in this country...  if there is money to be made or spent, it is basically up to the people to control themselves...  when there is any kind of boom, the public moves at the speed of light while govt and building moves at the speed of smell...  not gonna change that...  many of the residents of sturgis would love to have 1000 tourists in town every week instead of 500,000 there the first week of august every year...if the govt is here to serve the people, they are expected to listen to them... b4 all these new things were built up during the boom, people were constantly complaining about the lack of services, so the govt at every level made decisions to build and approve what was needed at the time... now, much of this seems frivolous, and the public has seemed to have forgotten what they were clamoring for a few years ago when these long term projects were approved... you can't just drop in new infrastructure and services like you drop 20 bucks at the beer store and leave with your beer...we live in a world of immediate satisfaction now days where we can access all of the known types of llama dander in milliseconds or fly to mexico for a quick vacation in a few hours...  building does not yet work that way...  there are threads on sites like this every year with people complaining about how the g&f should post the deer lottery results quicker, cuz people only have, what, 6 months to prepare for the hunt???  we have to be realistic about what happens, and what kind of time frame is needed...here's my big picture opinion of this boom...  in the mid 2000's when this horizontal and fracing technology was being tweaked (here and for the bakken), oil was up to $125 per barrel, there were billions flowing into the hands of the people who support our enemies,  the arab spring was going strong with much turmoil in the middle east, manufacturing was staring at a major down turn, technology was available to our enemies and they were getting caught up to us on r&d...  if this boom, and ultimately the results of it, were quelled from the start, i believe opec would have cut production instead of increased it, and we may have seen $200 per barrel oil and $10 per gallon gas...  what would the arabs have done with a few extra trillion in the bank???  i thank God every day that we don't know...</blockquote>

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