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Home Front: WoT
Tennessee hills spout Texas tea
2004-04-09
The WoT is all about the oil, right?
Amid sloping hills dotted with grazing Black Angus cattle in Pickett and Fentress counties, the most valuable money-making venture may be underground.
"Oh, listen to a story bout a man named Jed"
Last month, a Kentucky company hit oil on a farm in Pickett County. The pressure of oil naturally bubbling to the surface has been so great that the producers have been unable to remove the drill for the past 25 days.
"Up from the ground came a'bubbling crude. Oil, that is. Texas tea."
Its production has been reduced from a capacity of 800 barrels per day to about 500, which translates to more than $17,500 per day in revenue with today's high crude-oil prices.''It's an exceptional well,'' said Anthony Young of Young Oil Co. in Knob Lick, Ky. He bought the rights to several adjacent leases soon after the well hit. He plans to drill another 20 wells in the vicinity. ''This has been a hot area to drill in,'' he said. ''Tennessee is finally getting the recognition it deserves. It's a little Texas, I've always thought.''
"Only with trees..."
''There are thousands of acres east of this that have never been drilled,'' added Alan Murrell, one of the owners of Southeastern Energy, the company that discovered the oil. With prices climbing to a range of $35 to $38 a barrel, there is more incentive for investors to plunk down the risk money to explore and drill new wells. On average, one third of all drilled wells don't produce anything, despite seismic exploration techniques and other technology that has improved in recent years.
This is why the oil industry has so many booms and busts. Prices go up, more wells drilled and more oil pumped, supply goes up, prices fall, companies lose money and shut down. Supplies go down, prices go up. Rinse, repeat.
Posted by:Steve

#13  2 things needed. ONe of which Bush is addressing, the other he is not (yet).

1) Hyrdogen economy - Fuel Cells. Use them in Hybrid vehicles. Cost effective if you can get a scalable way to deliver the hyrdogen - or better yet, create it where needed.

2) Nuclear plants. Lots of them. Get our electrical grid completely away from natural gas and oil, replace ALL of it with Nukes. Use Japanese style plants: they fail to a safe condition and require active measures to keep the reaction going, unlike the standard reactors we have now. Let the Navy train the operators, and the Marines train the guards - they've operated Nukes uder hard circumstances for half a century.

Do that and we get off the sauce except for what we produce - and that will only be needed for things like plastics.
Posted by: OldSpook   2004-04-09 11:50:23 PM  

#12  This is a scale problem. A 500 bpd 'gusher' is literally a drop in the ocean. You would need well in excess of ten thousand such finds to replace imports and find at least a thousand new ones a year thereafter and that ignores depletion.

What is needed is a completely new source of energy that has oils characteristics of being easy to get out the ground, easy to transport, and convenient to use at the point it is required. Coals problem is not that it is dirty. The problem is that it not convenient to use and is relatively hard to transport and get out the ground. Techology may be coming to the rescue with engineered bugs that convert coal in the ground into gas and oil. There are huge amounts of deep coal all over the world that will last for centuries. Now wait for the greenies to start their 'sky is falling' routine.
Posted by: Phil B   2004-04-09 10:56:32 PM  

#11  The first oil-boom towns were in Pennsylvania and Ohio, so this isn't all that surprising. I remember seeing wells pumping in central Ohio during the late '70s; they're all capped now because OPEC's managed to keep the prices low enough to make most wells in the US unprofitable. If OPEC keeps playing games, those wells will start looking good again, and the price will stabilize as they come on line.
Posted by: Robert Crawford   2004-04-09 10:54:31 PM  

#10  high prices for gas? I just filled my new F-150 (I knew what I was getting when I bought it - no complaints) with Regular here in San Diego at $2.19/gal...I say Hugo Chavez should die and a refinery built in his name
Posted by: Frank G   2004-04-09 8:50:00 PM  

#9  Cheddarhead: If that means we have to wean our selves off of our current heavy oil use so be it.

We are the Saudi Arabia of coal. We just need to find new ways of cleaning up the emissions and we're off to the races.
Posted by: Zhang Fei   2004-04-09 4:40:15 PM  

#8  Old Patriot

Usually it is gas who propels oil to the surface and that means we get only a fraction of the oil contained before the gas runs out. Anyway in the sixties we only managed to extract 15% of the oil contained in a layer. Today it is significantly higher I think 25 or 30%. I am not sure but is possible that wells declared exhausted several decades ago could be reopened thanks to modern techniques allowing to get some of the 85% of the
oil who remained behind.
Posted by: JFM   2004-04-09 4:24:59 PM  

#7  Ulitmately it is my belief the way to win the WOT is for Western Civilization to become completely energy independent. If that means we have to wean our selves off of our current heavy oil use so be it. I'd rather pay a higher cost for gas right now if all of the oil came from the US or at least North America. Ultimately it would be cheaper for our nation given that even though the cost was higher we would not be funding the regimes of the asshats.
Posted by: Cheddarhead   2004-04-09 3:57:54 PM  

#6  The area of northern Louisiana was surveyed in the early 1930's, and hundreds of wells were drilled. Most hit oil at between 800 and 3500 feet, including two wells on land that now belongs to one of my cousins. The wells mostly played out in the late 1950's. One of my cousin's neighbors just had one of the major oil companies drill a new well a few hundred feet from the old one, and struck three oil-bearing layers. The only one commercially feasible was at 27,750 feet, and it would only produce aoout 200 barrels a day - not enough to make it worthwhile for them. Two miles away, they hit a totally different reservoir that produces over 1500 barrels a day - at 29,000 feet. There's probably as much oil and gas still in the ground as we've pumped, but finding it and getting it out is still an expensive gamble.
Posted by: Old Patriot   2004-04-09 1:50:18 PM  

#5  I once had a professor in a class regarding energy in the early 80s. I'll never forget him saying that the area east of the Mississippi river was floating on a pool of oil. The guy seemed to know his stuff and I've always wondered what the deal was.
Posted by: Lucky   2004-04-09 1:03:17 PM  

#4  Knob Lick??!??? I bet the claimed expat population/alumnus of that place is exactly zero. (Where ya from? Well, uhh....)
Posted by: Bodyguard   2004-04-09 12:52:19 PM  

#3  Does this mean the Titans get re-named the Oilers again?
Posted by: Dar   2004-04-09 12:22:56 PM  

#2  we can only hope that this will tap into some deep dark well. Yes, Virginia, there is a God. Kerry must be bummed.
Posted by: B   2004-04-09 11:37:57 AM  

#1  Stop the drilling now! Save the fragile Tennesse reef system! Save the Rocky Top Twisted Tortoise!
Posted by: abu bin quiet place   2004-04-09 11:33:05 AM  

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