Thanks largely to the Denver-Julesburg (DJ) Basin, Colorado ranks fourth among the 50 states in crude oil production, topped only by Texas, New Mexico and North Dakota — and, if it were a state, the offshore Gulf of Mexico (GOM). It’s also noteworthy that more than 80% of Colorado’s oil production comes from one county — Weld, the heart of the DJ and an hour’s drive northeast of Denver — and that a lot of consolidation has been happening in the DJ’s upstream and midstream sectors. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at the DJ Basin and the increasing concentration among the producers and midstreamers active there.
Join us at our historic 20th School of Energy!
School of Energy: Foundations is a two day, in person conference designed to help energy professionals better understand the forces shaping crude oil, natural gas, NGLs, refined products, and petrochemicals.
Attendees will learn from RBN experts, work with Excel based analytical models, participate in Q&As, and network with industry peers.
Build the foundation to better navigate volatile energy markets.
When it comes to crude oil, the Permian Basin seems to get just about all the attention and what’s left goes mostly to the Bakken, the Eagle Ford and the GOM. “SCOOP/STACK” and “Alaska North Slope” won’t be uttered on many Teams or Zoom calls today and it’s only slightly more likely that you’ll hear “DJ Basin.” But as we hinted at in our introduction, the DJ is a significant crude oil producer, with Weld County alone producing about 360 Mb/d in recent months and the rest of northeastern Colorado chipping in another 60 Mb/d or so.
As we said in our 2020 Drill Down Report on the DJ Basin, rapid growth in the play’s crude oil production in the second half of the 2010s led to a major buildout of crude gathering systems, storage and takeaway pipelines. That — and a leveling off in DJ production in the early 2020s — has left market participants in good shape from an infrastructure perspective, with more than enough capacity to move their crude from the lease to the Cushing, OK, oil hub. The primary long-haul pipelines out of the DJ are the Saddlehorn/Grand Mesa (yellow line in Figure 1 below), White Cliffs (blue line) and Pony Express (red line) systems, which together have the capacity to move almost 800 Mb/d of oil from the DJ (and other production areas to the north) to Cushing.
Figure 1. DJ Basin Crude Oil Takeaway Pipelines. Source: RBN
Join Backstage Pass to Read Full Article
About the song
“I Guess He’d Rather Be in Colorado” was written by John Denver, Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert. It appears as the second song on side two of John Denver’s fourth studio album, Poems, Prayers & Promises. The song is a whimsical paean to being stuck at a job in New York City while yearning to be in Colorado, with its blue skies and majestic mountains. Personnel on the record were: John Denver (lead vocals, acoustic guitar), Bill Danoff (acoustic guitar) and Dick Kniss (bass).
Poems, Prayers & Promises was recorded at RCA Studios in New York City in 1970-71 with Milton Okun and Susan Ruskin producing. Released in April 1971, the album went to #15 on the Billboard 200 Albums chart. It was a watershed album for Denver, with two charting singles — “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” and “Sunshine on My Shoulders” — being released from the LP.
John Denver (Henry John Deutschendorf Jr.) was an American singer and songwriter. He was a popular acoustic/soft rock artist of the 1970s and appeared in several motion pictures and television shows, including John Denver and Friends, which he hosted in 1976. Denver released 30 studio albums, eight live albums, 17 compilation albums, and 44 singles. He won an ACM Award, three American Music Awards, two CMA Awards and an Emmy Award, He is a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Denver died in October 1997 at the age of 53 when a small plane he was piloting crashed into Monterey Bay near Pacific Grove, CA.
