I haven’t been living under a rock I was just too busy to get to this earlier today. An I wanted a little time for more information to surface.

Norway’s Statoil has a 4.7 billion dollar cash offer to purchase Brigham Exploration (bexp) for 36.50 a share which seems like a good price until you realize that it works out to about $12,500 an acre which is not too far off from what a landowner could expect in royalty payments over the lifespan of a good well.

“The Brigham Exploration Company board of directors has unanimously recommended to its shareholders that they accept the offer.” and… It sounds like they plan to keep all of Brigham’s employees so it is probably a good deal for everyone who works at the company.

My personal feeling is that the only ones getting screwed are the stock holders because the stock price would have probably gotten over 36.50 a share this year anyway, but as it stands everyone still made some money so maybe it is OK.

I have a feeling this acquisition may be the first many significant buys in the Williston Basin.

The ripples caused by the news influenced some other in other small company’s around the basin.  It almost looked like people were taking their gains and moving strait into Oasis which I think may also be on someones acquisition list.

Here is what Statoil has up on their site regarding the potential acquisition.

http://www.statoil.com/no/NewsAndMedia/News/2011/Downloads/Presentation%20-%20Fargo.pdf

Local Mirror

The web site will get drastically restructured over the next few weeks/days.  I will try to fix the rigs page so that it counts again. (may not be easy)

Thoughts go out to those involved with the Cyclone 18 Rig Fire.

Cyclone 18 Rig Fire from freeway rest area

Rigs page is down until I can clean up the coding. It works the server processor hard for a few seconds while it loads and has caused some problems. (not sure how long it will take me to fix)

Update: removed the count function for now.

Lately, I have been slacking on writing blog posts, but I do think that most people who come to this site are missing the point. This web site is meant to generate interaction between people with similar interests (The blog and information portion is more of a side show). Please become a member of our forum and check out the job site. If you happen to work for a company in the Willison Basin, please let your HR people know that the job site exists. Unlike most job sites, ours currently and will always operate for free. Companies are encouraged to link to their regular hiring services.

In other news, the rig counts page has been modified so that it will only display companies that are actually drilling. There have been layout changes in every section of the site, but most people will not notice much difference. That said a few sections were widened so old monitors might have a little trouble fitting everything on the page. Please let us know if anything has become unreadable due to the changes.

For some reason the page has some bad data stored and would not load.  (The page always loads slow because it has to do some math before it loads.)

If you see any of the new players that need to be added let me know.