| | | Newsletter from Montana - Minnesota
January 2012
My website for the Montana property listings passed the half million mark. To celebrate, I gave the site a new look and added a Facebook and Tweet button on the top, maybe someone would like to tout it from the roof top :-)
You can find the rest of my property listings for Montana and Wyoming at
http://montanahereicome.com/Listings
I also added a new link in the left margin that will let you search properties by county:
http://montanahereicome.com/LW.htm
Double click on the state of your choice and then select the counties you are interested in. Hold down the Ctrl key if you want to select more than one.
Since I had reset the counter of my website in September of 2005, I had a little over 100 closings - so that would boil down to about 5,000 hits per closing. I had well over 100 closings before then, while I didn't keep the website records, I do think it was pretty close to the same number everything considered. I find that interesting, since the statistic for inquiries before we had the Internet was about 1000:1.
Sheep Mountain - the beautiful acreage with Forest access - has almost sold out. The four parcels I had listed there last year all sold or are under contract. But now the owner of the original ranch just listed the 97 acres he had reserved for himself! He had picked out a beautiful homesite and installed underground electric and phone among the trees. From there you have close up views of the Beartooth Range but you can also see hundreds of miles to the north where the Snowy Mountain Range shines up in the sun on a clear day. The acreage has an aspen stand where an underground creek forms a small pond. The panorama includes aspen, large spruce trees on the rolling foothills toward the mountains and the ever present wildlife, from moose to elk, they are all there. From your property here you can take your horse right into the National Forest via lofty trails and lush valleys. There is even a hidden waterfall in the mountains waiting for you to sit down for a picnic. $785,000
http://montanahereicome.com/Mountain
If you would like to own a smaller piece of Montana I have acreage in Nye for sale, where the deer and elk outnumber the locals three to one:
Ten acres with private forest and river access, rock formation, trees and groundwater availability for $109,000 - owner will carry!
http://montanahereicome.com/Buffalo
Forty acres with a commanding view of the whole valley and fenced on three sides for $215,000 - No restrictions!
http://montanahereicome.com/Forty
Lush five acres on the Stillwater River - a Blue Ribbon Trout Haven - with mountain views and trees $235,000
http://montanahereicome.com/Stillwater
If you don't care for acreage and would like something maintenance free - how about the log home in Nye. It is a gated community with easy access and the caretaker will keep an eye on your home if you choose to go south for the winter. Rent a horse in summer and ride to the Yellowstone Park - 26 miles through the Wilderness from there.
http://montanahereicome.com/Cathedral
The acreage near Joliet can now be bought in smaller pieces with owner financing, no restrictions, county road access and mountain views, conveniently located between Billing and Red Lodge:
40 acres for $85,000
80 acres for $160,000
160 acres for $240,000
or all 203 acres for $295,000
http://montanahereicome.com/Joliet
If you like to ride, nicely graveled county roads will take you through the countryside for miles on end with views of the Beartooth, the jagged Crazies and the Yellowstone valley!
Did you know not all oil floats on water? The American Petroleum Institute gravity, or API gravity, is a measure of how heavy a petroleum liquid is compared to water. If its API is greater than 10, it is lighter and floats on water; if less than 10, it is heavier and sinks. The API scale was designed so that most values would fall between 10 and 70 API gravity degrees. European refineries prefer the lighter variety, they are all set up for it, while most of our American refineries are specialized in heavy oil, because that is what was mostly produced over here along with the heavy tar from Canada. But the game has changed with new technology, quite similar to the time when the rail road opened up the West.
The trains had transformed America from a nation of farmers to an urban, industrial nation. The net of rails woke up sleepy little towns like Atlanta, Chicago, Billings and Dallas to grow into bustling cities almost overnight with new factories and countless new jobs sprouting up like wildfire. The growth escalated into new industries such as steel, telegraphy and civil engineering. The standard of living rose.
Along came another discovery for making steel from pig iron which was paired with the newly patented open-hearth furnace. This combination lowered the cost of steel 82 percent. Meanwhile, the need for more rails, bigger bridges, taller buildings and industrial steam engines and machinery all drove demand for steel through the roof. The Second Industrial Revolution roared to life and America's businesses - and its people - thrived.
In 1947 the convergence of discovery, technology and demand brought prosperity to America for a third time. Physicists at Bell Laboratories discovered the point-contact transistor. Within five years it gave rise to semiconductors and solid-state technology and sparked the electronics age. People listened to car radios, watched shows on affordable new TV sets and balanced their growing checkbooks with pocket calculators. Workers across the country earned a solid, honest wage in the burgeoning new electronics industry. Silicon Valley was born. Personal computers and the Internet followed.
The new boom soon to take America's prosperity to a new level is the technology to harvest shale oil. It is no secret that several significant 'new' oil and natural gas deposits have been discovered across the U.S. recently. The Eagle Ford shale deposit, the Bakken shale, the Haynesville and Fayetteville shales, the Marcellus and Utica shales. The list seems to grow every few months. Just this past summer the Niobrara shale started making headlines - adding Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming to the list of states rich in deposits. So far I found out that the Institute for Energy Research pegs the total recoverable oil from U.S. shale deposits at as much as one trillion barrels - nearly FOUR times the amount of proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia. I posted a map of known shales in the lower 48 on my website:
http://goldandcoal.com/shale.htm
But what is shale? Until recently it was a nuisance and got in the way of oil drilling. Shale traps oil in fissures and cracks a mile or two below the surface. Shale oil is not a nice puddle where you can dip in a pipe and pump it out. The new technology sinks the pipe 5,000 to 10,000ft down and then they bend it 90 degrees and run it for another mile! Water and sand is pumped in under high pressure to slightly expand the small fractures in the stone. The sand then holds the cracks open so the oil between the rocks can flow out and the water carries it into the perforated pipe to be pumped up by the well. A well like this costs between $5MM and $10MM and employs around 120 people or more. Several counties in Texas recently pulled out of poverty, and we already know about North Dakota and Eastern Montana.
I had a very nice young man call me early this month who literally talked me into listing his oil project, which was quickly followed by two other companies who wanted to see their projects on my website. Well, now since I finally understand the gold mining business a little bit, along comes oil! Here are my oil listings:
http://goldandcoal.com/Jada
http://goldandcoal.com/Arcadia
http://goldandcoal.com/Fund
Rumor has it, America's dependency on foreign oil has already dropped below 50 percent for the first time in 15 years - and yet shale oil production has barely gotten started. Another new technology that is helping us on our way is the 3-D geological survey which can show us what is really there and where it is. Gone are the days of dry holes!
In 1974 geoscientists estimated the Bakken shale was capable of generating just 10 billion barrels of oil. Barely enough to satisfy current U.S. oil consumption for more than one year. In 2008 the North Dakota Department of Resources reported the Bakken contained 167 billion barrels of oil - nearly 17x more than previously believed. At our current rate of consumption, that's enough oil to last us 23 years - from just one shale deposit.
As recently as 2002 it was estimated the Marcellus shale contained about 2 trillion cubic feet of gas - barely enough to last the U.S. for one month. Today the Energy Information Administration estimates it contains at least 410 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas - 205 times more than previously believed. That's almost 17 years' worth of natural gas - the cleanest burning fossil fuel on the planet - from just one shale deposit.
And in 2009 no one thought the shale beneath Dimmit County, Texas was worth anything more than dirt...
Now - a little more than 24 months later - over 3 million barrels of oil have already been pumped out of the Eagle Ford shale. Well permits have soared from 94 to 1,010 - with as many as 30,000 expected before the play matures and 12,600 jobs have been created.
The nice part is, that the shale oil is "light" (clean) and "sweet" (very little sulfur) and instead of black, it looks more like honey; so those stinky refineries will soon be a thing of the past and will be replaced with European style refineries that don't dirty up the air we are trying to breathe.
Something else is light, sweet and likes to play, her name is "Puddy" - the kitten belongs to the Sheep Mountain Ranch owner. She goes to work with him every day, playing on the dashboard while he drives through the city and here she retrieves paper balls:
http://montanahereicome.com/Fun/puddy.htm
Somebody else sent me this dog clip - watch his ears and lips as his owner talks about the bacon in the fridge:
http://montanahereicome.com/Fun/PoorDog
:-)
Best Regards,
Dorothea Lowe, Broker
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