ENERGY INDEPENDENCE ON THE HORIZON - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 54

using carbon dioxide; they also highlight massive production from the
Canadian oil sands—not quite America, but close enough to ot en add
to the total. In short, something unseen in almost half a century seems
to be under way in American oil. Nowhere is this more apparent than
when you look at what's been happening in North Dakota.

m m m

“Shale Shock! Could h ere Be Billions in the Bakken?” 7 It's safe to guess
that few reports from the staid U.S. Energy Information Administration
have matched the enthusiasm of this November 2006 entry. (“h e
Availability and Price of Petroleum and Petroleum Products Produced
in Countries Other h an Iran” was a more typical example. 8 ) It's also
reasonable to assume that few people noticed it at the time. But Steven
Grape, a petroleum engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy, was on
to something big.
If you had to pick one development that's been most responsible for
fueling talk of energy abundance, it would have to be the tight oil boom in
North Dakota—and the source of the boom is the Bakken. In his report,
Grape l agged a sudden surge in oil coming out of neighboring Montana,
whose output had more than doubled over the previous i ve years. h e
upswing came from a single source: the Elm Coulee Field, which was
discovered in 2000 and then proceeded to more than double its output
every year. Drillers married horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing,
just as they had with natural gas, to unlock petroleum that others previ-
ously assumed was economically impossible to extract. But few beyond
the state paid much at ention to the phenomenon. Montana, at er all,
was still delivering less than a hundred thousand barrels of oil a day—a
fraction of a percentage point of U.S. consumption, which totaled nearly
twenty million barrels a day.
Within a couple of years, the action moved east to North Dakota,
where it would eventually explode. Before 2007, that state's oil pro-
duction had never exceeded 150,000 barrels a day, and for most of its
history daily output remained below 100,000 barrels, about half of 1
percent of U.S. demand for oil. 9 By 2011, though, the techniques used
in Montana were becoming widespread. North Dakota was producing