The United States is Swimming In Fossil Fuels
AGG
By Will Offensicht
Published: September 25, 2009, 09:38 AM
On April 10, 2008, the United States Geological Survey (USGS)
published an article "3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Technically
Recoverable Oil Assessed in North Dakota and Montana's Bakken Formation
- 25 Times More Than 1995 Estimate" which reported:
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.
Technically recoverable oil resources are those producible using
currently available technology and industry practices. USGS is the
only provider of publicly available estimates of undiscovered
technically recoverable oil and gas resources.
New geologic models applied to the Bakken Formation, advances in
drilling and production technologies, and recent oil discoveries have
resulted in these substantially larger technically recoverable oil
volumes. About 105 million barrels of oil were produced from the
Bakken Formation by the end of 2007.
The USGS analyzed only a small part of the Bakken rock formation; they
ignored the part of it that extends up into Canada because that's not
ours, though of course the Canadians would be happy to sell us whatever
oil it contains. Just the US part of the Bakken has enough oil to
entirely replace one years' worth of imports. Drilling it certainly
wouldn't solve all our petroleum problems, but finding a year's worth
of imports would buy us some useful time.
The article has links to a more detailed assessment of the oil deposit
along with a podcast of an interview with the scientists who analyzed
the rock formation. And what the scientists had to say is worthy of
some deep thought, not just for the good news about the Bakken itself,
but for its further implications about American oil resources.
For many years, even Big Oil had considered the continental US to be
fully explored. As a result, America's point of "peak oil" has long
been thought passed; existing American wells would slowly trickle out
and die one by one, each year producing less and less with no hope of
finding any more.
It appears that new technology has made a lot more oil accessible that
was previously unfindable or irretrievable. The USGS has a "National
Oil and Gas Assessment" map which shows where they think oil might be
found or where it has already been found. According to this official
government map, the USGS believes that there are 16.6 trillion cubic
feet of undiscovered natural gas in the Powder River Basin and shows
recoverable oil and gas in many other locations. The Economist reports
that enough shale gas has been discovered to supply America for 90
years. The Wall Street Journal goes further, saying:
According to the authoritative Potential Gas Committee (administered by
the Colorado School of Mines), the U.S. sits on top of massive
reservoirs of natural gas�an estimated 2,000 trillion cubic feet�that
contain more energy than all the oil in Saudi Arabia.
It seems that we have a great deal of accessible fossil fuel in the
continental United States. Why are we talking so much about offshore
drilling - as useful as that might be? More particularly, why are we
continuing to buy so much oil from odious enemy regimes in the Middle
East when we can perfectly well supply ourselves right here at home?
It appears that last summer's slogan of "Drill Here, Drill Now" was
even more appropriate than we realized at the time.
Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an
internationally published author by a different name. Read other
Scragged.com articles on energy, oil and natural gas.
http://www.scragged.com/articles/the-united-states-is-swimming-in-fossil
-fuels.aspx
--
vjp...@at.biostrategist.dot.dot.com
It is definitely and cleverly and appropriately USA policy to spend
everyone else's petroleum before our own. So what! It shows that our government can occassionally do things right!
Yegrin Prize fp 1991 ISBN 978-0-671-79932-8
p428 Such was the call in A_National Policy_for the_Oil_industry, a
controversial book by Eugene V Rostow, a Yale Law School professor. A new
Federal agency, the National Security Resources Board, made a similar
argument in a major policy review in 1948; importing large amounts of Middle
Eastern oil would allow a million barrels per day of Western Hemisphere
production to be shut in, in effect creating a military stockpile in the
ground - "the ideal storage place for petroleum."
- = -
Vasos Panagiotopoulos, Columbia'81+, Reagan, Mozart, Pindus, BioStrategist
http://www.panix.com/~vjp2/vasos.htm http://www.facebook.com/vasjpan2
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
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