Elliott Gue
Editor, The Energy Strategist recent newsletter wrote
“.... Just past Williston, off old State Highway 85, you start to get a sense of what is truly shaping up to be the biggest oil boom in 109 years.
Bakken oil has spurred hundreds of Jed Clampett-like true stories in North Dakota of ordinary folks getting rich overnight.
At Daizy Duke’s Diner over in Hazen, the regular breakfast crowd in mesh farm caps is talking about a Tupperware saleslady becoming an overnight millionaire from oil royalty payments.
In Buffalo Gap, you hear about the descendants of Scandinavian and German homesteaders trading in battered farm trucks for a Cadillac or Lincoln.
Out here on the edge of the nation’s breadbasket, nobody ever gave much thought to what lay beneath the Durum wheat fields. But there’s black gold two miles below.
In North Dakota, the only question in my mind was which oil company in the Bakken would end up becoming the big winner. The answer soon became crystal clear.
Up and down the Red River, the locals all talked about one little oil company locking up the oil leases...
And one thing’s for sure: Third-generation wheat farmers in North Dakota know a heck of a lot more about who’s signing oil leases in the Hell Creek delta than any so-called “expert” in New York City.
After carefully analyzing the balance sheets, leases in the Williston Basin and drill test results of 372 oil exploration, development and production companies, it turns out the locals are right.
Operating in stealth mode, one under-the-radar wildcatter has seized control of over 453,000 leasehold acres within the oil-rich Williston Basin of North Dakota and Montana.
The little independent is successfully leveraging advanced drilling and completion technologies: horizontal drilling, multi-stage isolated fracture stimulations and 3-D seismic imaging.
And the company has drilled over 50 wells this year in its Williston Basin acreage. And that number is expected to quadruple.
As the half-witted brokers and bankers on Wall Street put two and two together in the next 6 months, my top-secret recommendation is going to explode!
And that’s not the half of it...
It turns out this little-known wildcatter is secretly backed and controlled by the Hunt oil dynasty in Texas!
My sources tell me the Hunt oil dynasty is pulling the strings up in North Dakota. And that’s no surprise. When it comes to controlling massive oil deposits, the Hunt clan has a long and storied history. …..”
North Dakota issues first potash permit in decades
Dakota Salts™ properties overlie the Williston Basin which today yields over 33% of the world™s potash supply. The North Dakota State Government Geological survey estimates there are some 50 billion tonnes of potash in North Dakota. Dakota Salts™ claims cover some 19 square miles of land 155 miles north-west of Bismarck. Based on a wealth of historic data, Dakota Salts™ claim area overlies known exploration targets where typically the potash seam is 20ft-35ft thick at 8000-9000ft beneath the surface. The K2O (potash) grade ranges between 10-25% and dependant on grade, the land has been estimated to contain 2.1 to 5.2 million metric tonnes per square kilometer.
Its properties are close to rail, gas and water infrastructure.
Article below courtesy of
North Dakota has approved its first exploratory drilling permit in more than three decades for potash, a form of salt used for fertilizer.
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The state Department of Mineral Resources issued the permit Friday to Denver-based Dakota Salts LLC for one test well near Lignite in Burke County. The company is using grant money from the state to study whether the mines can be used to store compressed air for electricity-generating wind farms once the potash is removed.
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Dakota Salts is a subsidiary of London-based Sirius Exploration PLC, which has mining interests in China, Australia and Macedonia. The company said it has leased more than 6,000 acres in northwestern North Dakota for salt and potash mining.
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Toby Hall, a Sirius Exploration spokesman in London, said the 8,900-foot deep test well will be drilled by the end of the year.
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Only four test wells have been drilled for North Dakota potash, the last in 1976, said Ed Murphy, the state geologist.
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Besides storing compressed air, Dakota Salts says the mining caverns also could store carbon dioxide from North Dakota's coal-burning power plants or natural gas from the state's oil fields.
North Dakota's Industrial Commission gave the company a $225,000 grant in April to study the ideas. Gov. John Hoeven, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem and Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring make up the commission.
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Murphy said North Dakota likely holds some 50 billion tons of potash. North Dakota's potash beds, created by oceans that dried up some 400 million years ago, cover about 11,000 square miles in the northwestern corner of the state, he said.
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About 90 percent of the potash used for domestic crop production comes from mines in western Canada, the U.S. Geological Survey says.
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Some of the biggest mines in Canada are less than 150 miles north of North Dakota, Murphy said. The Canadian and North Dakota deposits are contiguous, though the potash in Canada is found at shallower depths and is easier to recover.
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Canadian potash beds, which supply most of the world's demand, are about 5,000 feet beneath the surface. North Dakota's potash deposit ranges from 5,600 feet to about 12,000 feet underground, Murphy said. Three companies considered mining North Dakota potash in the 1960s and 1970s but believed it was too deep.
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Potash is recovered by traditional mining and by solution mining, a process that involves injecting liquid in holes to dissolve and recover it. Dakota Salts intends to do the latter.
Advanced drilling techniques learned from the oil industry could help cheaply reach the potash at North Dakota's deeper depths, Murphy said. Hall said there is no timeline for North Dakota potash mining.
"Clearly, the first priority is potash exploration ... and the need to start proving it up with up-to-date data," he said.
