Business Insider – by Akin Oyedele
The US Geological Survey said Tuesday that it found what could be the largest deposit of untapped oil ever discovered in America.
An estimated average of 20 billion barrels of oil and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids are available for the taking in the Wolfcamp shale, which is in the Midland Basin portion of Texas’ Permian Basin.
Based on a West Texas Intermediate crude oil price of $45 per barrel, those deposits are worth about $900 billion.
US oil exploration companies have flocked to the superrich Permian Basin in recent years and used shale-drilling technology to create an oil boom that simultaneously helped trigger a price crash two years ago. The count of active oil rigs fell with prices, but has risen over the past few months, mostly in the Permian. Bloomberg noted that the Wolfcamp, where this deposit was found, has been one of the primary targets of shale drillers.
“The fact that this is the largest assessment of continuous oil we have ever done just goes to show that, even in areas that have produced billions of barrels of oil, there is still the potential to find billions more,” Walter Guidroz, program coordinator for the USGS Energy Resources Program, said in a statement.
More than 3,000 horizontal oil wells have already been drilled and completed in the Midland Basin Wolfcamp section, according to the USGS. To get the oil, producers fracture, or “frack,” the earth below with a high-pressure liquid mixture to untap oil and gas from shale rock.
This map from the USGS shows the area where the deposit was found:
USGS
Aha…. America’s biggest oil discovery……is it going to Israel or China?
Israel will “broker” the deal with China – they win, we lose.
I’d say Israel…unfortunately (since I know this area, esp. Midland-Odessa, where we shop a lot…few stores in my neck of woods in Big Bend), there are many Christian Zionist churches in the Permian Basin area.
We just found it. Just now. Seriously. We haven’t known about it for 50 years. We just now found it. Just now.
Have to keep that myth of peak oil going….it’s not like the earth creates all this oil in the upper mantle under tremendous pressure and heat and it filters up into pockets in the crust.
“The fact that this is the largest assessment of continuous oil we have ever done just goes to show that, even in areas that have produced billions of barrels of oil, there is still the potential to find billions more,” Walter Guidroz, program coordinator for the USGS Energy Resources Program.
Fossil fuel my arse.
Bullsh#t!
The Midwest has more oil than all of the Middle East countries combined.
They don’t like to talk about THAT one, however. Saving it all for a ‘rainy day’.
Yep. YOU BETCHA!