BROWNING, Mont. (AP) — George Sutherland of Cut Bank works 12-hour daily shifts for weeks at a time on a wildcat oil exploration rig, but the $28.50 he earns hourly makes the long days well worth it, he said.
"I just kind of hope they stick around," said the 42-year-old Sutherland, standing in the "doghouse" of Rig 41, a smile crossing his dirty face. "As long as they're here, I'll be here."
A small spill from an oil collector pipeline in June that went unreported for weeks gave the Blackfeet Tribe a black eye at a bad time, just as a flurry of oil exploration is leading to good-paying jobs for tribal members such as Sutherland, said Grinnell Day Chief, the Blackfeet Tribe's director of oil and gas.
The tribe, he said, hopes the exploration will lead to recoverable oil. Production would lead to even more local jobs in the oil industry, and the possibility of millions of dollars in royalties.
Results from the exploration are confidential — but promising, he said.
"The success of some of these wells is going to be good," Day Chief said. "We will eventually have some production here."
Three oil companies — Anschutz Exploration Corp. of Denver and Rosetta Resources and Newfield Exploration Co., both of Houston — are leading the exploration.
The three companies have either drilled — or received permits to drill — 37 exploration wells since 2009 on the 1.5 million-acre Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Glacier County, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which regulates mineral exploration on the reservation.
They have filed another 50 notices of staking, the precursor to seeking a drilling permit.
The reservation hasn't seen this much exploration activity in decades, said Don Judice, who heads BLM's Oil and Gas Field Office in Great Falls. It can cost at least a few million dollars to drill a single horizontal well on the reservation, he said.
"There is a great deal of effort being expended by the companies and the agencies to permit, test and evaluate the wells on the reservation to determine whether they have discovered a reservoir," he said.
Judice called the exploration work a "science project." Oil companies are in the process of collecting data to see if oil beneath the reservation is economically viable to produce, he said.
The operators have leased mineral rights from the tribe and individual allottees to explore for oil. If oil is discovered, the tribe and allottees would receive royalties, perhaps as much as 15 percent of production.
Driving the interest is the deep Bakken shale formation, Day Chief said.
The companies are looking to replicate the success of operators in the Williston Basin of Eastern Montana and Western North Dakota, where horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are being used to tap the Bakken.
Source: News Times
No comments:
Post a Comment