DJ Basin Could Produce 4 Billion Barrels Of Crude Oil

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... just using estimates from the two biggest oil and gas companies — Noble Energy Inc. and Anadarko Petroleum Corp. — working in the DJ Basin, which sprawls north and east of Denver into Wyoming and Nebraska.

The two companies, together, figure the DJ might be capable of producing at least 4.1 billion barrels of oil equivalent and possibly as high as 4.6 billion barrels, figures that include other natural gas liquids such as propane, butane and ethane.

And that number is likely to go even higher,...

Again, let's put that into perspective. The Bakken could be a trillion-barrel reservoir (and that's just the middle Bakken and the upper Three Forks formations in the Williston Basin). With a paltry 3% recovery rate, that comes out to 30 billion bbls of recoverable oil. Let's say Harold Hamm is off by a factor of two, and the middle Bakken / upper Three Forks is only a 500-billion-bbl reservoir but operators get a 5% recovery rate: 25 billion bbls. A reminder: a throw-away line in a recent article suggested the primary recovery rate in the Bakken might be as high as 15%.