An update on an earlier prediction by Goldman Sachs.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=aBgHsyAv_E9Q&refer=energy

An update on an earlier prediction by Goldman Sachs.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=aBgHsyAv_E9Q&refer=energy

Natural gas was discovered in northwestern Louisiana in 1870.  A water well drilled in Shreveport caught fire when a worker noticed a strange wind escaping from the hole and struck a match to get a better look.

Oil explorers began drilling wells in 1904, searching for black gold.  What they found was a little oil along with huge flows of natural gas.  For years, millions of cubic feet of natural gas were either flared or vented, in order to recover small amounts of oil.  Legendary oil men, Mike Benedum and Joe Trees, knew there must be a better way.

There was.  Producers had already begun using steel pipe to “case” oil wells.  The problem is that boreholes are not uniform in diameter from top to bottom and neither are they always vertical.  Wash-outs and deviations are the rule rather than the exception.  With water wells, wash-outs and deviations presented no problem.  When large flows of natural gas were present, they often blew-out, uncontrolled.  Joe Trees’s father suggested a way to cure the problem – the use of cement to bind casing and formation.

In the early days before Halliburton, no one knew how to cement a well.  After much experimentation, cementers learned they could put the cement directly down the borehead – they did this with shovel and elbow grease – and that the weight of the cement would cause it to u-tube out of the pipe and up the backside, cementing the casing and the borehole.  Later, cementers learned they could employ heavy fluids to displace the cement out of the casing, raising it hundreds of feet.

Using this technological advance, monster gas flows in the area were soon contained, allowing for deeper drilling and the recovery of oil that early explorers had long known was present — oil otherwise unrecoverable, except for a simple sack of cement.

http://www.ericwilder.com

When compared with the price of crude and heating oil, natural gas is a relative bargain.

Bloomberg.com: Energy.

http://www.ericwilder.com

Disaster in China seems to be prodding the price of crude oil upward.

Oil pushed above $127 a barrel for first time: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance.

http://www.ericwilder.com