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Thursday, February 23, 2012

What N. Dakota Knows that CA Doesn’t: The Real Boom is in Traditional Energy, Not “Green Jobs.”

North Dakota currently has the lowest state jobless rate in the country at 3.3% and California is second-highest in the nation at 11.1%, and the Golden State hasn't seen a single-digit jobless rate now for three full years.  With that contrast in mind, here's an excerpt from "What North Dakota Knows that California Doesn’t," by Brian Calle in CityJournal:

"If California policymakers want to lift the state out of its economic malaise, they would do well to emulate . . . North Dakota. Once the least-visited state in America, the Peace Garden State is rapidly becoming the economic envy of the nation. Its 3.3 percent unemployment rate is the lowest of any state, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. North Dakota also boasts a state budget surplus of $1 billion. Compare these figures with California’s 11.1 percent unemployment rate—second highest in the country—and a likely $13 billion budget deficit in the coming fiscal year, and suddenly the Great Plains look like an attractive alternative to the Golden State.

How did North Dakota pull it off? Oil production has driven the recent boom. Drilling restrictions in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, and even Canada have given North Dakota an opportunity to expand its oil industry substantially. The state imposes no energy-efficiency resource standard for electricity or natural gas, and it has no mandatory statewide residential or commercial energy code. North Dakota lawmakers have let market demand dictate coal and oil production. According to North Dakota state senator John Hoeven, the state government’s approach to energy is to “develop all of our energy resources, both traditional and renewable . . . in a way where we incentivize new technologies to create more energy more dependably and more cost-effectively with good environmental stewardship.”

While California is rich in both conventional and renewable energy, gridlock in the state legislature has hampered development of these resources. Unlike North Dakota’s officials, who welcome the economic growth and new revenues, California lawmakers seem intent on reducing the state’s role in domestic oil production. Legislators have imposed laws much stricter than federal standards and worked aggressively to subsidize alternative energy sources and mandate their use. California law requires that the state obtain at least one-third of its energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal—and imposes onerous costs not only on businesses, but on every ratepayer and consumer in the state. One study projected that the law will cost the state economy $183 billion—a staggering burden for Californians already struggling under the highest energy prices in the nation.

By contrast, North Dakota’s underdog story illustrates how a different approach to public policy—and in particular, to traditional energy procurement—can bolster economic activity and job creation. While Golden State legislators bow to special interests and dither in a dream world where “green jobs” save the day, North Dakota is reaping the economic benefits of traditional energy production. It’s time California did the same."

26 comments:

  1. Fracknation is up to 77% funded. It looks like it will get there.

    I hope it costs Obama the election.

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  2. After 3 yrs of an illegal drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, Keystone pipeline cancellation, an executive order that placed Atlantic Coast, all of the Pacific Coast, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and parts of Alaska off-limits to new offshore drilling, several attempts to raise taxes on oil companies, and just a general all out war on fossil fuels.....Obama finds himself in an election year with a public righteously pissed off about the price of gas.

    Today he announced algae will save us. It's 33 dollars a gallon, but that's cheap compared to where the price of gas will be if this moron gets another 4 years.

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. The EIA estimates California Monterey to have four times the technically recoverable oil of the North Dakota Bakken oil field, but California Democrats are determined that none of it will ever be recovered. This despite the fact that offshore oil seeps severely damage the coastal environment and could be reduced or eliminated by drilling and recovery. And given the current state of technology, none of the drilling would have to be done offshore. Horizontal wells located inland could be drilled in order to recover these vital resources, helping to preserve our coastal environment in the process.‏

    Despite the fact that commercial oil wells have been pumping in downtown Los Angeles - yes, you read that right, downtown L.A. (The Hidden Oil Wells of Los Angeles ) - for decades without environmental incident, the left has convinced itself that any further drilling will lead to catastrophe.

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  5. Che: "This despite the fact that offshore oil seeps severely damage the coastal environment and could be reduced or eliminated by drilling and recovery."

    One has to wonder if the effects caused by natural oil seeps should even be called "damage". They are "natural", after all, isn't that OK? :)

    I thought fossil fuel was only evil if taken out of the ground.

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  6. A common fallacy of "our side" is to endlessly repeat the mantra that "government doesn't work." It DOES work. Just not as promised.
    Ask just about any unemployed Californian about moving to North Dakota for a job and they will laugh in derision - they'd rather state in the Golden State - a logical decision in a welfare state.

    We pay people not to work. That works. More choose not to work -- by postponing their return to work (well, returning to "on the books" work).

    Here's the URL for the latest WALL ST JOURNAL article on unemployment insurance -- aptly named "Paid Not to Work":
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203824904577217792498104980.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h#articleTabs%3Darticle

    As of December, ten counties in North Dakota have under 2% unemployment. Their statewide unemployment rate is 3.3%. They are crying for employees, but can't find enough, even in this recession.

    Why? Because today's unemployed people are not sufficiently motivated by their status to disrupt their lives and move to a less hospitable location. In short, unemployment insurance (coupled with other welfare benefits such food stamps, utility subsidies, etc. etc.) lowers the "mobility of labor," as the economists put it.

    And it's not just North Dakota that offers better employment options. Other low unemployment states include Nebraska (4.1%), South Dakota (4.2%), Vermont (5.1%), New Hampshire (5.1%) and Iowa (5.6%).
    http://www.bls.gov/lau/

    There ARE jobs in this country, but the interest in employment is too often subordinated to "staying put."

    If government simply "didn't work," often that might not be as bad as envisioned. The fact that it DOES work -- causing adverse consequences not envisioned by our central planners -- is perhaps a more perverse problem for America.

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  7. LOL...Note how nobody is pretending that shale gas is viable any longer? A few months back the article would have been about how ND is doing so well because of the abundant natural gas resources (as well as the liquids) trapped in shale. Now that we have seen the gas producers get wiped out I wonder how long until the shale liquids scam is exposed for what it is.

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  8. Hey Mark, here's something Continental Resources (the biggest Bakken driller) said in their earnings transcript yesterday which no one in the press has picked up on: They're estimating the total amount of in-place oil in the Bakken shale and associated Three Forks formation is 900 billion barrels:

    LINK
    "Thank you, Harold, and good morning, everyone. As you may recall, Continental acquired 6 cores of the entire Three Forks formation in 2011 and discovered they were up to 3 additional layers where benches of low bearing dolomite within the lower Three Forks formation. The significance of this discovery, and what makes us such a game changer, as Harold mentioned is, that the volume of oil in plays for the field, almost doubles with this added reservoirs.

    Based on our estimates, the oil in plays now stands at around 900 billion barrels of oil versus our previous estimate of 577 billion barrels of oil. This in turn, should ultimately translate into more technically recoverable reserves for the field. Just how much more remains to be seen, but we have taken the first step to demonstrate through the bid that the second bench of the Three Forks is a commercial reservoir."

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  9. "Now that we have seen the gas producers get wiped out I wonder how long until the shale liquids scam is exposed for what it is."

    When the price of oil crashes to, like, $30/barrel, due to proliferating oil production in the same way proliferating shale gas production crashed the price of natural gas, then, yes indeed, the shale liquids bubble will burst.

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  10. Bad News: When it comes to spurring the North Dakota economy, oil is still only about one-half as important as federal lard.

    ND is still a Pink State.

    Net federal spending in North Dakota is about $3.5 billion (Tax Foundation stats). The state gets about $5k per capita in net federal spending and has a population of 684,000.

    There are 16,000 oil jobs in ND, let's be generous and say they pay $100k each. That's $1.6 billion.

    The ND oil boomlet falls on top of on of the pinkest states in the Union. Really, Norman Thomas is the real president of North Dakota. They get back $1.68 for every dollar sent to DC.

    Way more people in ND rely on federal lard than oil jobs. But, I still want more oil drilling there. Maybe they can bootstrap themselves into being productive citizens, and not parasites.

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  11. "There are 16,000 oil jobs in ND"

    That understates the impact. For every oil industry job there are needs for truckers to transport the oil and equipment, people to build houses, school teachers to teach the kids of all of the above, waiters and waitresses to wait tables for all of the above, government workers to process all the drilling applications and mineral ownership inquiries, construction workers to build and repair roads, construction workers to build pipelines and oil/gas processing facilities, and so on, and so forth. Some nice videos to give you an idea:

    LINK

    LINK

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  12. "When the price of oil crashes to, like, $30/barrel, due to proliferating oil production"

    LOL.

    that's hilarious.

    tell you what, i'll sell you a whole pile of leap puts on oil struck at $40 for $1 each. if you're right, you get 10X your money.

    you a buyer?

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  13. Precisely, morganovich. I suggest you offer your bet to VangelV, not me.

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  14. unknown-

    then you do not understand vangel's position.

    he thinks oil has peaked and that shale is mostly a money loser at this point.

    why would he bet that prices drop?

    you seem to be the one claiming that oil prices are going to drop due to new production, or have i misunderstood you?

    if you believe pries will drop to $30, then you should take my offer.

    if not, then i misunderstood what you were saying.

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  15. @morganovich,

    VangelV does not understand - or, more likely, does not want to understand - that as long as oil prices remain high, shale oil booms such as the one in North Dakota will be profitable. With current prices, they are *not* money losers. The only thing that's going to turn the shale oil boom into a bust is if the price of oil crashes and stays there for an extended period of time (at least several years). If he does not think oil prices are going to crash, then his hope that the shale oil "bubble" will pop will go unfulfilled.

    Rising production of shale gas is precisely the reason why the price of natgas has tanked. VangelV is now declaring them a failure, when in fact they were a roaring success. In fact they were so successful they crashed the price of natgas. Shale gas companies were a victim of their own success.

    Whether or not the same phenomenon happens to shale oil on a worldwide scale, I don't know. We're already seeing it have *some* effect in the US and Canada through the widening spread between Brent (which is unaffected by North American shale oil production) and WTI (which *is* affected by North American shale oil production). I suspect over the long run it will continue to keep a damper on North American oil prices. And I'm not the only one who believes that:

    LINK 1
    LINK 2

    I have no idea what will happen to the world outside NA. If shale oil plays such as the ones in the US and Canada take root in other parts of the world, then in the very long term, yes, we could see a big oil price crash. Don't ask me what timeline I think for that, because I don't have any idea.

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  16. unknown-

    "- that as long as oil prices remain high, shale oil booms such as the one in North Dakota will be profitable"

    that is not his argument at all. his argument is that even at current prices that they are losers.

    personally, i lack the information to weigh in on that, but i am very clear that that is his position.

    "Rising production of shale gas is precisely the reason why the price of natgas has tanked."

    but this does not mean it is being extracted profitably. flooding the market with houses dropped their price too, but that does not mean the developers were ever gonna make money.

    his point, which seems logical though i do not have the facts is that extraction costs exceed market price and that these companies are doing it to boost reported reserve ratios and because they find it east to raise money and pour it down ratholes.

    think back to the .com bubble. it's not a wildly far fetched idea.

    i do not know if he is right or not, as i really do very little in the oil patch, but i can say for damn sure that oil is not going to $30.

    gas is a special case as well as the pipelines are full. transmission is the bottleneck. if there is more gas for sale than can go in the pipe, well, you get some very nasty price declines.

    introducing more pipelines would up gas prices.

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  17. "that is not his argument at all. his argument is that even at current prices that they are losers"

    I was originally referring to his comment above:

    "LOL...Note how nobody is pretending that shale gas is viable any longer? A few months back the article would have been about how ND is doing so well because of the abundant natural gas resources (as well as the liquids) trapped in shale. Now that we have seen the gas producers get wiped out I wonder how long until the shale liquids scam is exposed for what it is."

    Notice he said the gas producers are being wiped out. Obviously that's because of the low prices which are above the cost of production - which, as I noted, were caused by overproduction. Next he segues that argument into liquids; e.g. the same thing that happened to shale natgas will happen to shale liquids. So, whether he intended to or not, he did, in effect, say shale liquids will follow the path of shale gas - that is, a period of overproduction will bring about a price crash.

    Oil at $100 is like natgas at $7: Both will make shale extraction profitable. He has, in other posts, acknowledged the latter, but if he denies the former he's being hypocritical.

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  18. VangelV does not understand - or, more likely, does not want to understand - that as long as oil prices remain high, shale oil booms such as the one in North Dakota will be profitable.

    Profitability would only be possible if the returns on the energy invested is sufficiently positive to justify the investment in the first place.

    I point out that not too long ago Mark and others were touting the profitability of shale gas and pointing to production volumes as evidence. But anyone who understands the accounting and the SEC rules knows that it is easy to claim a profit if you overestimate the ultimate recovery from a given well and increase the estimated reserves. Somehow few paid attention to the story told by the production curves and the cash flows. I suspect that we could see something similar for most shale liquids producers in a year or two.

    That does not mean that it may not turn out to be nominally profitable to produce shale oil. Borrow cheap and when prices hit $200 a barrel because of Fed liquidity injections pay off the loans with money of lower purchasing power. If real rates stay negative you can have the illusion of profitability for as long as the party lasts. If you are stupid AND lucky that could be quite some time. But if you are smart you will see that there are much better opportunities to make a killing from safer investments.

    With current prices, they are *not* money losers.

    How do you know? If it costs $7 million for a well and you are down to 80 bpd in a year after a hyperbolic decline rate it will be hard to make any money. Keep in mind that I had this argument with the optimists about gas not all that long ago. Their position was not exactly built on sound logic and valid data so they got what they deserved. Shale oil could wind up in a similar place if the decline rates do not improve and the EURs are as optimistic as the EURs for shale gas were.

    The only thing that's going to turn the shale oil boom into a bust is if the price of oil crashes and stays there for an extended period of time (at least several years). If he does not think oil prices are going to crash, then his hope that the shale oil "bubble" will pop will go unfulfilled.

    You don't get it. I don't care about the price. I care about the return on energy invested. That return shows up in the total cost of developing a well and delivering the product to market. We could easily have $300 oil and still wind up with unprofitable shale oil production if the returns are negative.

    Those that cannot remember the past are likely to make the same stupid errors that others made before them. In the case of shale we had similar claims made many times before.

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  19. Notice he said the gas producers are being wiped out. Obviously that's because of the low prices which are above the cost of production - which, as I noted, were caused by overproduction. Next he segues that argument into liquids; e.g. the same thing that happened to shale natgas will happen to shale liquids. So, whether he intended to or not, he did, in effect, say shale liquids will follow the path of shale gas - that is, a period of overproduction will bring about a price crash.

    That is not what I mean. I am pointing out that the total energy of producing shale oil may be higher than the energy that can be extracted from shale oil. While you can make money of there is a timing opportunity that allows you to borrow long at very high negative real rates that game is too risky for a prudent person to take when there are real opportunities that have been mispriced because of the shale scam that people like Mark have been pushing.

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  20. When the price of oil crashes to, like, $30/barrel, due to proliferating oil production in the same way proliferating shale gas production crashed the price of natural gas, then, yes indeed, the shale liquids bubble will burst.

    I don't believe that the oil price matters as much as the return on the energy invested over the long run. If I can use the energy equivalent of 1 barrel of oil in energy to produce 14 barrels of oil I do not care about the price because the cost of production will fall substantially.

    The bigger issue at this time is the ultimate recovery for each well. If I borrow $7 million to drill a well I better get more than $7 million of oil out of it in a reasonable amount of time or I will go bankrupt. (Note that the $7 million figure can fall very sharply if the cost of energy collapses.)

    The shale gas scam showed us how the players were overestimating the EURs and downplaying the production curve declines. While some players could make money because they were in the sweet spots of good formations the industry was losing money because the cost of the drilling could not be offset by the price of the product. When I look at the ND aggregate data I find that the average well production is very low even though we have seen thousands of new wells drilled in the past few years and many old wells taken off line. That is setting off a log of alarm bells in my mind and my gut because it removes the shale industry from the investment pile and puts it in the speculation pile. This does not mean that an agile trader type can't make a lot of money in the sector. It most likely means that the average investor will take a beating.

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  21. "If I borrow $7 million to drill a well I better get more than $7 million of oil out of it in a reasonable amount of time or I will go bankrupt."

    $7 million to drill a well, presuming $80/barrel oil, will require only 87,500 barrels before the well pays for itself. If you cared to do some research on the EUR's of recent Bakken wells, they're anywhere from 250K barrels to 500K barrels EUR, depending on operator and location. So even if these companies are exaggerating their EUR's by 100%, they will still be profitable.

    I regret to inform you that oil companies pay no attention to EROEI. You can think and wish that they did until you were blue in the face, but your efforts will be 100% in vain.

    "The shale gas scam showed us how the players were overestimating the EURs and downplaying the production curve declines."

    You're just so cluelessly wrong it isn't funny. I mean, really, you're just downright dense. I repeat: The reason why shale gas has now gone bust is because producers of said product were fantastically successful, not because they were failures. If over-estimated EUR's and production decline curves were the over-riding factor, natural gas would be scarce and the price would be, like $7, not $2.50.

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  22. $7 million to drill a well, presuming $80/barrel oil, will require only 87,500 barrels before the well pays for itself. If you cared to do some research on the EUR's of recent Bakken wells, they're anywhere from 250K barrels to 500K barrels EUR, depending on operator and location. So even if these companies are exaggerating their EUR's by 100%, they will still be profitable.

    I look at the aggregate data and find that the drilling of thousands of new wells still has daily output below 100 bpd. That is not enough to pay for the drilling, production, and transportation costs and generate a profit. Since old wells that are taken off line are removed from the data and do not act to bring the numbers down the numbers suggest major problems for the producers.

    And so do the cash flow statements in the 10-Ks. If the wells were as productive as you say the producers would not have to keep going to the market for financing. But they are not only looking for new funds they keep increasing their borrowing.

    I regret to inform you that oil companies pay no attention to EROEI. You can think and wish that they did until you were blue in the face, but your efforts will be 100% in vain.

    That does not matter. But cash flows do matter. And they are not looking very good no matter how you try to spin the story.

    Keep in mind that mine was the minority view on this site not too long ago when we were discussing the great profits in gas. Well, the optimists were wrong. They would have been wrong even if gas did not fall to the current low price because the break even number was much higher. It took no special skills or insights to see what was going on because the 10-Ks and conference calls told us all that we needed to know. The problem was that the mountebanks and optimists did not care about the reality and were happy to spin tall tales of untold riches.

    The same is happening now. In a year or two the negative cash flows will be much harder to ignore and some of the financiers will blink. If there is any liquidity event that drives prices lower the hedge funds will jump on the trend and tell the story far better that I can. At that time the naive optimists will be crushed and the usual conventional players in the sectors will have a field day picking up decent assets at liquidation prices from companies that have to sell the good with the bad.

    The irony is that one can take a much safer path if one wanted exposure to the energy sector and expected oil prices to go up. The sad thing is that too many people would rather believe a good story than look at true opportunities.

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  23. You're just so cluelessly wrong it isn't funny. I mean, really, you're just downright dense. I repeat: The reason why shale gas has now gone bust is because producers of said product were fantastically successful, not because they were failures.

    You have a funny idea of what success really is. When you need to sell your price for $7.50 to break even but you have to keep producing at $3.00 you are not really a success. You are a failure.

    If over-estimated EUR's and production decline curves were the over-riding factor, natural gas would be scarce and the price would be, like $7, not $2.50.

    Not at all. The total is going up because of the huge amount of drilling that had to be done to keep the leases. The fact that depletion was much higher than estimated did not mean much when you are drilling more wells than is required to keep production flat.

    But the EURs matter to the claimed break even price. When AM was saying that he needed a $7.50 price that was based on a EUR that was twice what the production curves were suggesting was reasonable. As long as the real recovery rates were ignored the red ink could be kept off the 10-Ks. But the cash flows could not be doctored and they would continue to tell investors what they needed to know. Actually, most management groups were actually pretty good. While they spun tall tales they were very clear about the funding gaps and the need for asset sales to keep things going. Sadly, few paid attention to what was said because the temptation to dream of riches was too much to resist.

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  24. VangelV, your replies are so fantastically illogical it isn't funny. For example:

    "Not at all. The total is going up because of the huge amount of drilling that had to be done to keep the leases. The fact that depletion was much higher than estimated did not mean much when you are drilling more wells than is required to keep production flat."

    Breaking news to VangelV: The fact that producers *could* and *did* increase production so much indicates that the shale plays were as good as advertised, or even better. If these shale plays were worse than advertised, they would not have been able to increase production by so much.

    And another wondrous piece of logic (not):

    "You have a funny idea of what success really is. When you need to sell your price for $7.50 to break even but you have to keep producing at $3.00 you are not really a success. You are a failure."

    Breaking news once again: You just admitted above that producers produced more than they should have. A simple study of Economics 101 will tell you that will result in a price crash. So, the reason they're producing gas at $2.50 instead of $7.50 is because they were so damn good at producing the stuff in the first place! (duh!) Perhaps you never heard of the term, "Victim of their own success."

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  25. Breaking news to VangelV: The fact that producers *could* and *did* increase production so much indicates that the shale plays were as good as advertised, or even better. If these shale plays were worse than advertised, they would not have been able to increase production by so much.

    No. If you actually paid attention you would have known that many of the CEOs made it clear that they HAD to drill. If they were free to choose how to allocate their resources they would not produce gas for $7.50 when the market price was under $3.00. If the shale plays were good you would see positive cash flows not funding gaps and forced asset sales.

    Breaking news once again: You just admitted above that producers produced more than they should have. A simple study of Economics 101 will tell you that will result in a price crash. So, the reason they're producing gas at $2.50 instead of $7.50 is because they were so damn good at producing the stuff in the first place! (duh!) Perhaps you never heard of the term, "Victim of their own success."

    No. As usual you write out of ignorance. Economics 101 is not driving this game. The terms on leases held by the companies are the driver. The leases were acquired when the shale producers expected prices to explode and costs to come down. They are on the assert side of the balance sheets. If the companies do not drill they lose the leases and have to write down the assets. Since they have very little equity most would wind up in immediate bankruptcy, which is not good for highly paid managers who like getting paid as much as they can get for as long as they can get it.

    You are also missing another point. Money losing shale operations actually have value for large conventional players. The reason is obvious to anyone who understands the accounting rules. There is no NI 43-101 equivalent for shale gas production. Companies are free to guess how much gas is in place and how much of it can be produced economically. When converted to reported reserves the ratio used is based on the 6:1 energy content, not the 30:1 price difference. This means that a conventional player with a lot of production but reserve issues can hide the problem by picking up a money losing shale outfit that produces at a loss.

    If the management of the acquiring company uses its stock as a currency to pick off small players with conventional or viable unconventional reserves it gets those reserves at a discount. By the time that reality has to be recognised the company would have replenished some of its reserves at a very good price and the hit to its shares by writing off the shale assets would not be very harmful. In fact if the industry did that over a short period the write-down of shale assets would cause prices to explode and investors in the players with real reserves to make quite a bit of money from the game.

    You are obviously misinformed about the health of the shale gas producers. I suggest that you take a close look.

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  26. North Dakota is also the only state that has a state bank. So when the credit markets were melting down in 2008, and bond issuers were having to pay penalty rates of 20% or more on their previously issued "auction rate securities", BND was lending to municipalities and banks in the state to keep their market going. This kept ND from being the mortgage wasteland that the rest of the nation has experienced. Furthermore, lobbyists for Wall Street have lobbied other states to guarantee that no other state follows ND to escape the clutches of wall street.

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