Russ Steele
We have heard a lot about the decline of oil reserves, which are estimates based on current technologies. With new technologies and higher prices, new reserves come on line. Consider this from the Next Energy News
America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.
In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel.
When we were in Canada several years ago, there was extensive deep exploration going on just across the Montana and North Dakota border. This exploration was focused on the deep oil under under the shallow producing Canadian oil fields. There could be even more oil just North of the border, we will have to wait for the report.
UPDATE: Here is an article in Business Week.
