Companies line up to drill after survey shows Dakota oil, gas fields far bigger than believed

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WASHINGTON –  Energy companies are lining up for their shot to drill in the Dakotas and Montana after a new government report revealed that a massive geological formation stretching across the states contains twice the oil and three times the amount of natural gas than was originally believed.

While the new estimate is drawing smaller companies to the game, the larger players like Schlumberger, Halliburton and Continental Resources are pushing forward with ambitious multi-year plans to stake their claim in the industry.

Continental recently announced a five-year plan to triple its production by 2017. The company’s growth is based on success in North Dakota and Montana as well as in parts of Oklahoma.

The dash to drill follows news from the government on how much more oil and natural gas there is to tap.

“These world-class formations contain even more energy resource potential than previously understood, which is important information as we continue to reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign sources of oil,” newly confirmed Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said Tuesday in a statement.

The new U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are 7.4 billion barrels of oil, 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 0.53 billion barrels of natural gas liquids in the Bakken and Three Forks Formations in the Williston Basin Province of Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota.  

Since 2008, close to 450 million barrels of oil have been produced in the area and if the government estimates are correct, that leaves billions of barrels of oil and trillions more cubic feet of natural gas left for the taking.

That’s good news for North Dakota -- a state that’s already reaped big benefits from the oil boom and has one of the strongest state economies in the country coupled with an exceptionally low unemployment rate. Tax revenues from natural gas and oil hit $1 billion last year in North Dakota and the state is on track to double that number next year.  

Republican Sen. John Hoeven believes numbers from the new USGS survey will draw even more developers to the area.

“This will mean a lot of jobs,” he told FoxNews.com. “Financially we are already very strong, we have no debt, but this will mean a lot more. Stores, restaurants, movie theaters – we’ll have to build and we’ll have to hire workers.”

The competition to court employees is already on at the McDonalds in Dickinson, N.D. where prospective hires are being lured in with $300 signing bonuses, Hoeven said.

Calls to McDonalds Corp. for comment were not immediately returned.  

Some environmental experts like John Harju, associate director for research with the Energy and Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota, believe the possibilities are even greater than what the government forecasts.

“Like any of these USGS estimates, think of them as a milemarker that’s well behind you in the rearview mirror,” he told the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota.

Still, not everyone is as gung-ho as Hoeven about drilling for natural gas, and the controversial process known as fracking used to access it.

The government hopes to calm some opposition to natural gas by releasing a set of draft rules to regulate hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The process involves injecting a high-pressure mix of water, sand and chemicals deep into rock formations to release trapped oil and gas.

Supporters say the drilling method should continue and is credited for the country’s domestic energy boom. They say fracking gives the country a chance to cut its dependence on foreign oil.

Environmental groups have long objected to the practice and say it pollutes the groundwater and kills crops and livestock. They also argue that fracking releases heat-trapping methane gas into the air.

But in mid-April, the Environmental Protection Agency dramatically lowered its estimate of how much methane leaks during natural gas production. The agency said that tighter pollution controls put in place by the industry from 1990 to 2010 cut the country’s average of methane emissions by more than 850 million metric tons overall, or about 41.6 million metric tons annually. That’s a 20 percent decrease from previous EPA estimates – a decrease that took place as natural gas production in the country grew by nearly 40 percent in the past two decades.  

It is not clear exactly when the government will release its fracking regulations, but it is expected in the next few weeks.

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Facebook overhauls News Feed with sorting feature, bigger pictures and more

The world's biggest social networking company is getting ready to unveil a new version of News Feed, the flow of status updates, photos and advertisements that Facebook users see on the site.

Facebook Inc. is hosting an event Thursday to show off "a new look for News Feed." It will be Facebook's second staged event at its headquarters since the company's May initial public offering. The company unveiled a search feature at the first one in January.

Facebook users often complain about changes to the site, whether it's cosmetic tweaks or the overhaul of privacy settings.

The event comes a month after a Pew study reported that many Facebook users take a break from the site for weeks at a time. The report, from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, found that some 61 percent of Facebook users had taken a hiatus for reasons that range from boredom to too much irrelevant information.

Overall, though, Facebook's user base is growing, especially on mobile devices. At last count, it had 1.06 billion active monthly accounts. The number of people who access Facebook daily is also on the rise.

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Americans endure bigger income cut than government can handle

Americans are a lot better at belt-tightening than the people they send to Washington.

As Americans’ income fell by 3.6 percent in January, President Obama and Congressional leaders were warning of the dire consequences of sequester, the budgetary booby trap that forces cuts of as little as a third of that from the mammoth federal spending plan. Working stiffs sucked it up and absorbed the biggest monthly drop in income in 20 years, while the elected officials insisted that the federal budget had no fat to trim.

Financial planning experts say if Americans can take such a big bite out of their paychecks, Washington should be able to weather a similar cut, percentage-wise.

“If you compare [the sequester cuts] to sacrifices a regular family has had to make, you’re talking about the money you find in your couch cushions.”

- Larry Winget, best-selling author

“If you compare [the sequester cuts] to sacrifices a regular family has had to make, you’re talking about the money you find in your couch cushions,” said Larry Winget, the best-selling author of “You’re Broke Because You Want to Be.”

“When regular folks need to cut the household budget, they get rid of their toys, their cable TV, eating out,” Winget continued. “If they can make those kind of cuts, the federal government ought to be able to.”

The sequester cuts were put in place more than a year ago as a means of forcing lawmakers to come up with a better cost-saving solution. President Obama famously said during a debate with Mitt Romney that they would “never happen.” But as the deadline drew near and it became clear that no deal was in the offing to head off the cuts, sober warnings emerged from the nation’s capitol. Some 800,000 Pentagon workers would be furloughed. Thousands of illegal aliens would have to be freed. Teachers and firefighters would be laid off.

"These cuts are wrong," President Obama said this week, calling sequester a "dumb way" to make cuts which amount to 2.4 percent or 1.3 percent of the $3.5 trillion federal budget, depending on which calculation is being used.

The sequester cuts, which hit defense hardest but also take a bite out of discretionary spending including foreign aid and the budget of most federal agencies, add up to $85 billion when pro-rated over a full year. But since the government operates on a fiscal year, actual spending will only fall by $44 billion this year, according to the Congressional Budget.

Financial expert and television personality Ben Stein said Washington’s dysfunction is best illustrated by the fact lawmakers had a year and a half to find a more gentle way to make the cuts, but couldn’t agree. Now the spending cuts are being imposed with a sledge hammer instead of a scalpel, he said.

“The problem is not the cuts, the problem is the meat-cleaver way it was done,” Stein told FoxNews.com. “We expect a LOT more care from our legislators and our president.”

Heritage Foundation President-elect Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator and fiscal hawk, wrote Friday that the White House is making it “seem like sequestration means the end of the world. “ But given that the federal budget nearly doubled to $3.5 trillion from $2 trillion between 2002 and 2012, and will swell to $6 trillion over the next decade, DeMint said the cuts don’t go nearly far enough.

“The sequester barely taps the brakes on this runaway spending,” DeMint wrote.

But the spending cuts Americans are facing at home are truly painful. The Commerce Department’s announcement on Friday verified what working Americans noticed in January, starting with the expiration of the payroll tax holiday, which equated to a 2.2 percent pay cut for most employees. A chronically struggling economy further eroded incomes even as heating bills, gas prices and food costs continued to rise. The falling income figures are expected to affect spending data through the first half of the year as households adjust to smaller paychecks.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the federal government should follow the lead of Americans, who are taking thinner wallets in stride.

“It’ absurd to think that the government cannot get by with a little more than a 2 percent reduction in spending when every working American had to figure out how to make do with 2 percent less in their paychecks just last month," McConnell said.

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Russian meteorite 1,000 times bigger than originally thought

It turns out the meteor that landed in Russia last week was a bit bigger than the 10 tons first reported. About 1,000 times bigger.

When a hunk of rock raced out of the morning skies over Russia on Friday and exploded with nearly 500 kilotons of energy, early size estimates from the Russian Academy of Sciences that were carried by the Associated Press, Reuters and other news wires pegged it on the small size, with a weight of about 10 tons.

Oops.

'This event was so much bigger than anything we've seen on video that it doesn't surprise me the guess was off by three orders of magnitude.'

- Margaret Campbell-Brown, physics professor at the University of Western Ontario

Later in the evening, after studying infrasound data from stations around the world, NASA released a new estimate revising that first guess upward by a thousand-fold: The meteorite actually weighed closer to 10,000 tons, scientists said.

“My guess is that someone eyeballed the videos and made an educated guess,” said Margaret Campbell-Brown, associate professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Western Ontario. “This event was so much bigger than anything we've seen on video that it doesn't surprise me the guess was off by three orders of magnitude.”

That poor estimate underscores the daunting task scientists face today: While NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program currently tracks about 10,000 objects through the heavens, there are far, far more smaller objects that are simply too tiny to track.

“If you think about objects the size of the one that came into Russia, you’re probably looking at 100 million up there. Of those likely to intersect Earth, there’s less, maybe 100,000,” said K.T. Ramesh, director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute and a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. “Space is pretty big.”

And the size of those smaller objects -- whether they’re 10 tons or 10,000 tons -- makes them impossible to track with current technology, he said.

“In general, we're pretty good at seeing things that are 1 kilometer and up in diameter, and have trouble seeing things that are less than 100 meters in diameter. The big problem is knowing where they are -- once you know where to look, you can find even the smaller objects,” he said.

For comparison, NASA currently believes the Russian meteorite was about 49 feet in diameter, or 15 meters. (Asteroid 2012 DA14, which NASA tracked on its flight near our planet on Friday, was approximately 150 feet in diameter, or 45 meters.)

“A good analogy is finding a few pennies scattered over an acre of dirt. If you know where to look, you have no trouble seeing them. But if you just look over the whole field, your chance of finding a penny is pretty small,” Ramesh told FoxNews.com.

Without sensors aimed directly at the incoming meteor, initial data was scarce. As other bits of data came in, scientists were able to hone their estimates of the size of the meteor, explained Edwin Bergin with the University of Michigan’s Department of Astronomy.

“Reports say that the network used to detect and infer nuclear explosions led to the revision,” he told FoxNews.com. “I think it just is better information that took time to filter out.”

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Russian meteorite 1,000 times bigger than originally thought

It turns out the meteor that landed in Russia last week was a bit bigger than the 10 tons first reported. About 1,000 times bigger.

When a hunk of rock raced out of the morning skies over Russia on Friday and exploded with nearly 500 kilotons of energy, early size estimates from the Russian Academy of Sciences that were carried by the Associated Press, Reuters and other news wires pegged it on the small size, with a weight of about 10 tons.

Oops.

'This event was so much bigger than anything we've seen on video that it doesn't surprise me the guess was off by three orders of magnitude.'

- Margaret Campbell-Brown, physics professor at the University of Western Ontario

Later in the evening, after studying infrasound data from stations around the world, NASA released a new estimate revising that first guess upward by a thousand-fold: The meteorite actually weighed closer to 10,000 tons, scientists said.

“My guess is that someone eyeballed the videos and made an educated guess,” said Margaret Campbell-Brown, associate professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Western Ontario. “This event was so much bigger than anything we've seen on video that it doesn't surprise me the guess was off by three orders of magnitude.”

That poor estimate underscores the daunting task scientists face today: While NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program currently tracks about 10,000 objects through the heavens, there are far, far more smaller objects that are simply too tiny to track.

“If you think about objects the size of the one that came into Russia, you’re probably looking at 100 million up there. Of those likely to intersect Earth, there’s less, maybe 100,000,” said K.T. Ramesh, director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute and a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. “Space is pretty big.”

And the size of those smaller objects -- whether they’re 10 tons or 10,000 tons -- makes them impossible to track with current technology, he said.

“In general, we're pretty good at seeing things that are 1 kilometer and up in diameter, and have trouble seeing things that are less than 100 meters in diameter. The big problem is knowing where they are -- once you know where to look, you can find even the smaller objects,” he said.

For comparison, NASA currently believes the Russian meteorite was about 49 feet in diameter, or 15 meters. (Asteroid 2012 DA14, which NASA tracked on its flight near our planet on Friday, was approximately 150 feet in diameter, or 45 meters.)

“A good analogy is finding a few pennies scattered over an acre of dirt. If you know where to look, you have no trouble seeing them. But if you just look over the whole field, your chance of finding a penny is pretty small,” Ramesh told FoxNews.com.

Without sensors aimed directly at the incoming meteor, initial data was scarce. As other bits of data came in, scientists were able to hone their estimates of the size of the meteor, explained Edwin Bergin with the University of Michigan’s Department of Astronomy.

“Reports say that the network used to detect and infer nuclear explosions led to the revision,” he told FoxNews.com. “I think it just is better information that took time to filter out.”

View the original article here