Thursday, February 23, 2012

Original Oil in Place -- The Bakken, North Dakota, USA

From wiki:
A research paper by USGS geochemist Leigh Price in 1999 estimated the total amount of oil contained in the Bakken shale ranged from 271 billion to 503 billion barrels, with a mean of 413 billion barrels  -- original oil in place (OOIP).  (200,000 square miles) 
With the deeper benches in the Three Forks formation, CLR says there could be 900 billion barrels of OOIP in the Bakken Pool.

Simply incredible.

Also from wiki:
Ghawar is an oil field located in Al-Ahsa Governorate, Saudi Arabia. Measuring 280 by 30 km (170 by 19 mi), it is by far the largest conventional oil field in the world. When appraised in the 1970s, the field was assessed to have 170 billion barrels of original oil in place (OOIP). (3,230 square miles)
"Drill, drill, drill is not an energy plan." -- President Barack Obama, February 22, 2012

6 comments:

  1. I think you typoed that Bruce. 900 million or 900 Billion?

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    1. Thank you for catching that last typo. I made several typos when I was typing this quickly and thought I had corrected them all. I missed that one.

      I was typing pretty fast to catch up last night.

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  2. Can you tell me why some of the wells are now IA in the Bakken?

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    1. I assume they are no longer economical. It's also possible with shortage of truckers/expense of truckers, if the wells are not hooked up to a pipeline, they are not worth the expense of keeping them active. It is my understanding wells are allowed to remain on the inactive list for 12 months, although my hunch is that this can be waived.

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  3. Drill, drill, pipe is an energy plan.

    I'm thinking new bumper sticker.

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