Posted on 08/09/2011 7:56:30 AM PDT by Bigun
North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.
A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released April 10, shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency's 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil.
(Excerpt) Read more at usgs.gov ...
I realize that we are not currently producing enough to supply our own needs but that does not mean that we cannot do so. We can and we should!
Good post!
One point that needs to be mentioned; these figures are before the latest increases in the recoverable oil. Also, it should be noted that the government estimates are historically much lower than the actual oil recovered once drilling starts.
Because the oil is owned by private companies and sold on the open world market.
Did you see this....(I chopped it up a bit but you get the idea)
Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon Details Their Giant New Oil-Weighted Discovery
- The Utica shale is located in Ohio, which sounds strange today as a place for an oil discovery, but Ohio and Western Pennsylvania were the birthplace of the oil industry in the 1850s.
- Could also be transformative for the entire country as they are talking about really big numbers. In the Utica there could be 25,000 wells drilled over several decades which would be over a $200 billion investment,
- In terms of oil and natural gas liquids, there could be 25 billion barrels of oil equivalent and could be one of the biggest discoveries in United States history.
You can also take it to the bank that if estimates are over 10 or 20 years old they are very suspect when compared with the newest methods. Almost always the new ones are much higher.
In some cases that is true but many companies are vertically integrated and buy very little, if any, crude on the open market. Others contract with privately for the stuff ALL the time!
Notice there is a lot of “if”s and “could”s in that announcement.
I read it more as an attempt to bump up a stock than a oil reserve statement.
It would seem to me to be largely irrelevant how much oil we have available. Some environMENTAL group or Obama’s EPA will tie it up in court making our resources unavailable and unusable. That is what they do.
What do you call a country that doesn’t allow the use of their natural resources?
Bankrupt.
What is 4.3 billion divided by 20 million?
Granted, we won’t shut off our other sources and it would last longer than a year if you could actually get it out that fast.
But 4.3 billion barrels equals about 2.6 years of our OPEC imports.
The important word in this sentence is "technically."
There is often a HUGE difference between the amount of oil that is "technically recoverable" and the amount "economically recoverable."
Of course the equation between technically and economically recoverable oil constantly changes with fluctuation of oil prices and development of new technology that makes more oil recoverable at lower cost. Which is why changes in fracking technology have changed things so much recently.
I think if you look at the actual numbers, you would be surprised. For example, ExxonMobil buys more crude oil than the produce themselves.
Part of the reason for this is the large world production by National companies where most of the worlds refining is done by investor owned companies.
You’re right.
I suspect your figures on amount of recoverable oil in other countries is based on “old” technology. It is likely other areas of the world will find additional oil reserves, using the new technology, similar to those in the USA. There is nothing particularly notable about North American geology relative to other parts of the world.
What this means, of course, is that the world probably has a significant multiple of the recoverable oil that we thought we did a few years ago. Which blows a pretty big hole in the “peak oil” hypothesis.
Hope springs eternal!!!
I worked for them for years and know that they do this for all sorts of technical reasons not because they have to.
It is, for the most part, a wash in terms of dollars and cents.
Absolutely!
All of which goes to the point of this thread which is that we can and should be developing ALL of our energy resources in this country and would be absent POLITICAL considerations.
This is welcome news but the US uses 6.8 billion barrels a year. It needs to be kept in perspective.
Actually, they do have to buy more oil than they produce. They have more than twice the refining capacity they have compared to production capacity.
They produce about 2.4 million barrels per day of liquids.
They refine about 5.3 million barrels per day.
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/Files/news_pubs_fo_2010.pdf
Page 28 & 76
Even if they refined 100% of what they produced, which they don’t, they still would have to buy even more than that amount to keep the refineries running.
It has nothing to do with their cash flow, but rather the business they own. Like most of the majors, rarely is the production of crude balanced with the refining quantities.
Witness the Austin Chalk in which most of the in place liquids were technically not recoverable in the 1930s when the discovery was made but certainly are today.
We are advancing the technology every day and no one can know what might be possible just a few years down the road.
Cars will be running on water before Muslim countries run out of oil in 100 years. We need to drill here, and drill now.
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