Oil Deposit Could Increase US strategic Reserves 2x

[The Grim Squeaker]

the upcoming release, on Thursday, of a report by the US Geological Survey on the Bakken Formation.
This is an oil field covering 200,000 square miles and underlying parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. A geologist who began surveying the field, before dying in 2000, believed it may hold as much as 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Later estimates have ranged to the hundreds of billions of barrels.
Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence.

One wonders as to what the bloody extraction costs will be, since as has been said before, Oil isn't the probem, (energy) costs are.
Oh, and the second comment on Slashdot is on PO. . Valdemar, is that you?

In addition, the line at the end (About "energy independance") is annoying, if the oil is cheap, then it will just delay the shift to Electricity, although if Us policies shift anyway (Top-down) then this will reduce the pain of the shift. (Especially until any infrastructure is built in a few years)

Thread title re-edited, There's oil there, but a billion barrels is a drop in the bucket considering we have twenty billion in the "reserve" already, at best we can double the strategic oil reserve, I don't know where the fuck Death got a 10x increase from, maybe a ten times increase in Dakota oil, but sure as hell not US oil.-Bean

[TithonusSyndrome]

Dammit, DEATH, didn't you bother to read the article they linked to?

The shale formation encompasses some 25,000 square miles in North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

This is a shale reserve they're talking about. Everyone on this board ought to know that oil shale is less crude oil and more snakeskin oil by now.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Oil of the future. Always will be.

[Fire Fly]

1 billion barrels? That's a pin drop; the US currently consumes 20.7 million barrels per day. The only way for 1 billion barrels to be a substantial number now is to drastically reduce our current rate of consumption, which is not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

If only more people would watch Dr. Albert A. Bartlett's lecture on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy" and how the exponential function is the most under appreciated mathematical function.

[Zablorg]

1 billion barrels? That's a pin drop; the US currently consumes 20.7 million barrels per day. The only way for 1 billion barrels to be a substantial number now is to drastically reduce our current rate of consumption, which is not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

If only more people would watch Dr. Albert A. Bartlett's lecture on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy" and how the exponential function is the most under appreciated mathematical function.

I think the problem is the average person know how much they contribute. After all, they don't use 20 million barrels a day.

[TithonusSyndrome]

The faith in the status quo to sustain itself, as held to be the case by your average apathetic idiot consumer fucktard, would be a double-edged sword if it were true. Our society would and could not collapse because food, shelter and heating have always been readily available and therefore always will be, but by the same token, third world countries will never be able to improve because they's-a always bane blowin' theyselves up over thar.

Either way, the status quo is here to stay and if you suggest otherwise, you're either a shrill chicken little or some kind of sanctimonious holier-than-thou liberal ideologue.

[LaCroix]

Oh joy... a ~2 months extra ration of juice (given you greedy Americans keep all the stuff for yourself ) and people think its a lot?

The reservoirs must be even emptier than I thought...

[Mr Bean]

This is why you fail at life death, you did not quote the origional you quoted a quote of the the analysis. Thread title corrected, Oil SHALE is not the same as OIL.

It is to be noted one of the primary stop-gap solutions for Oil is via processing Oil Shale into Oil, in the past because it costs roughly 40$ a barrel and add in refining down the line, no one was interested, but with oil at 108$ it makes sense to start looking at Oil shale again, and of course the US has a huge amount of oil shale Deposits, in fact the Green River Formation has an estimated 1.2 trillion barrels worth of Oil Shale in it.

So you say a billion? I say HA, we've got a trillion sitting under three states(Colorado, Utah and Wyoming) and a further half trillion in other states.(West Virgina, North Carolina) plus billion odd deposits like this one.

[J]

Bakken is what Professor Deffeyes refers to as "suitcase rock", the rock really doesn't want to let go of the oil. The percentage of recoverable oil is low and the flow rates are dismal. Adding insult to injury, the oil is in small fractured pockets instead of large continuous reservoirs. In short, it ranks down there near ultra deep water drilling or tar sands as a viable source of oil.

[J]

I just noticed the title change. Bakken is NOT oil shale. It's a conventional oil field where the reservoir rock happens to be shale. Unlike the Green River oil shale where the rock has to be cooked to extract oil, drilling a hole into Bakken will yield actual finished oil just like any other conventional oil field. It just won't flow from the ground all that fast, it's more of a trickle than a gusher.

[MKSheppard]

Pffft. We will make this flow with Project PLOWSHARE peaceful nuclear tests

[CaptainChewbacca]

Pffft. We will make this flow with Project PLOWSHARE peaceful nuclear tests

I like the way you think. Sadly, though, this field will never lower oil prices, it will only make the current situation last longer and give less incentive to develop alternatives.

[J]

Sadly, though, this field will never lower oil prices, it will only make the current situation last longer and give less incentive to develop alternatives.

Nothing short of finding several Ghawar type fields will drop oil prices, that is, a supergiant field which can flow 5-10 million barrels a day. Anything smaller is peanuts.

[Mr Bean]

Self correction it is in fact actual oil not Oil Shale, this is what happens from reading KXNet.com, bloody useless local news station. Thread title re-re corrected.

[Sea Skimmer]

I like the way you think. Sadly, though, this field will never lower oil prices, it will only make the current situation last longer and give less incentive to develop alternatives.

Well it won’t drop oil prices because oil prices will be way higher then they are now by the time any full scale oil shale mining effort could get going, but I’m pretty sure many shale oil deposits (ones that are no more then a few hundred feet below ground) can in fact be economically mined at only around 75 dollars a barrel.

Perfect excuse to put BIG MUSKIE into mass production. Also we’ll need bigger dump trucks, fuck that ‘tires must fit through railway tunnels’ limitation they’ve already hit designing them, a proper scale shale oil mine would be able to afford using the AN-225 for tire transportation.

[Admiral Valdemar]

The limits here are natural gas and fresh water. Without them, you can't process these kinds of hard to get and heavy oils. Bigger machinery is good, but by no means the end of the story. The Athabasca situation is telling of how much damage can happen when you go full pelt towards trying to claim these deposits with full mountain top removal in some instances.

[Ariphaos]

Later estimates have ranged to the hundreds of billions of barrels.

The total size of the field is fairly consistent through estimates - over a half trillion barrels, the news here is that a great deal of it appears to be recoverable via horizontal drilling, at ~$20-$40 per barrel. The recoverable percentage has been consistently going up - previous to this, the latest reliable estimate looks to be between 1-3%, or 5-15 billion barrels.

The rumor is that as much as half may be recoverable - which would double America's total reserves and give Canada's a very healthy boost. Of course, I'd want to see the report first.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The limits here are natural gas and fresh water. Without them, you can't process these kinds of hard to get and heavy oils. Bigger machinery is good, but by no means the end of the story. The Athabasca situation is telling of how much damage can happen when you go full pelt towards trying to claim these deposits with full mountain top removal in some instances.

But of course we will do that before we give up our SUVs, Valdemar.

Strip mining the entire state of Wyoming? Sure thing!, as long as it means you can drive a 12mpg penis extension back and forth to work every day, saving five minutes over the express bus line on the same route.

[Illuminatus Primus]

No matter where you stand, we need a full and total repudiation of the Republican Party's economic worldview; this corporate welfare, "trust the financier-speculators to allocate your resources and assets and organize the means of production" has come reached the end of any usefulness it may ever have had. Its time for a turn to long-view, science-dictated dirigisme.

[TimothyC]

Strip mining the entire state of Wyoming? Sure thing!, as long as it means you can drive a 12mpg penis extension back and forth to work every day, saving five minutes over the express bus line on the same route.

While I don't drive an SUV Duchess, I would like to point out that in some areas it isn't feasible to use public transit. I know if I were to do so It would take me over an hour and a half, and I would spend $3 one way, yes a monthly pass would cost me only 45$, but guess what - that's what I pay for gas in a month right now, and It only takes me 5-10 minutes to get to work driving. I'd love to see better public transit in the US (the DC Metro convinced me that it can work), but right now, it just doesn't work for a lot of people.

[Illuminatus Primus]

If we'd not deliberately subsidized extreme low-density development and personal automobile transportation (one of the side-effects being we basically paid for white flight and wrote-off our cities as slums and the commuting population as a shit-on underclass), then that wouldn't be the case. Sorry for you and people like you who made decisions based on a model promoted and encouraged by selfish and short-sighted economic elites and politicians, but now we need to discourage and make your situation more painful, I'm afraid, so the general incentive is to reconcentrate and compactify development and encourage public transit use and infrastructure at the expense of personal auto use and truck shipping. Don't get me wrong, that sucks but it's better than waiting too long and as well, we shouldn't leave you with just a stick, but also a carrot - there should be tax incentives for extremely efficient, low-endurance vehicles (both purchase and R&D) - and there should be tax incentives to move back to compact and nearby suburbs and the urban area itself. New Urbanism/Pedestrianism should be encouraged by incentives.

[Gandalf]

While I don't drive an SUV Duchess, I would like to point out that in some areas it isn't feasible to use public transit. I know if I were to do so It would take me over an hour and a half, and I would spend $3 one way, yes a monthly pass would cost me only 45$, but guess what - that's what I pay for gas in a month right now, and It only takes me 5-10 minutes to get to work driving. I'd love to see better public transit in the US (the DC Metro convinced me that it can work), but right now, it just doesn't work for a lot of people.

What's wrong with it taking 90 minutes and costing $3 each way?

That's less than what I'd pay to go to uni, and about the same amount of time.

[TimothyC]

What's wrong with it taking 90 minutes and costing $3 each way?

That's less than what I'd pay to go to uni, and about the same amount of time.

Because as I said - it only takes me 5-10 minutes to get to work via car. For me the convienece factor is worth it. It doesn't help the case of public transit that It literally costs me less to drive than to take the bus. The fact that I don't like the people that rid the bus (unsanitary and inconsiderate) puts driving over the edge.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

What's wrong with it taking 90 minutes and costing $3 each way?

That's less than what I'd pay to go to uni, and about the same amount of time.

Because as I said - it only takes me 5-10 minutes to get to work via car. For me the convienece factor is worth it. It doesn't help the case of public transit that It literally costs me less to drive than to take the bus. The fact that I don't like the people that rid the bus (unsanitary and inconsiderate) puts driving over the edge.

"Unsanitary and inconsiderate"? Occasionally you get a smelly one, to be sure, but aren't you typecasting? I ride the goddamned bus, and I bathe twice a day. We take the bus downtown all the time; I could get to Olympic College in ten minutes by car, but I'm willing to take the thirty minutes by bus, including transfer, one because gas prices are hideous and two over parking, but also out of a recognition that cars are undrivable soon enough.

You had better get to work on getting bus service in your area improved, then, because within another couple of years the $10.00 a gallon gasoline you can expect is going to drive you out of your precious dick mobile and back into the crowd with all the "Smelly" people on the bus.

[J]

From the USGS website

Linky

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—
Released: 4/10/2008 2:25:36 PM

Reston, VA - 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.

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 Bakken study was undertaken as part of a nationwide project assessing domestic petroleum basins using standardized methodology and protocol as required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 2000.

The Bakken Formation estimate is larger than all other current USGS oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest "continuous" oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. A "continuous" oil accumulation means that the oil resource is dispersed throughout a geologic formation rather than existing as discrete, localized occurrences. The next largest "continuous" oil accumulation in the U.S. is in the Austin Chalk of Texas and Louisiana, with an undiscovered estimate of 1.0 billions of barrels of technically recoverable oil.

"It is clear that the Bakken formation contains a significant amount of oil - the question is how much of that oil is recoverable using today's technology?" said Senator Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota. "To get an answer to this important question, I requested that the U.S. Geological Survey complete this study, which will provide an up-to-date estimate on the amount of technically recoverable oil resources in the Bakken Shale formation."

The USGS estimate of 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil has a mean value of 3.65 billion barrels. Scientists conducted detailed studies in stratigraphy and structural geology and the modeling of petroleum geochemistry. They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates.

USGS worked with the North Dakota Geological Survey, a number of petroleum industry companies and independents, universities and other experts to develop a geological understanding of the Bakken Formation. These groups provided critical information and feedback on geological and engineering concepts important to building the geologic and production models used in the assessment.

Five continuous assessment units (AU) were identified and assessed in the Bakken Formation of North Dakota and Montana - the Elm Coulee-Billings Nose AU, the Central Basin-Poplar Dome AU, the Nesson-Little Knife Structural AU, the Eastern Expulsion Threshold AU, and the Northwest Expulsion Threshold AU.

At the time of the assessment, a limited number of wells have produced oil from three of the assessments units in Central Basin-Poplar Dome, Eastern Expulsion Threshold, and Northwest Expulsion Threshold.
The Elm Coulee oil field in Montana, discovered in 2000, has produced about 65 million barrels of the 105 million barrels of oil recovered from the Bakken Formation.

Results of the assessment can be found at http://energy.usgs.gov.

For a podcast interview with scientists about the Bakken Formation, listen to episode 38 of CoreCast at http://www.usgs.gov/corecast/.

So there's enough oil there to keep the US running for oh...6 months.
That's right, 6 months.