Posted on 05/04/2005 6:52:14 PM PDT by kellynla
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A tiny oil company has snapped up leasing rights to a half-million acres in central Utah that it says could yield a billion barrels or more of oil.
Geologists are calling it a spectacular find — the largest onshore discovery in at least 30 years, located in a region of complex geology long abandoned for exploration by major oil companies. It’s turning out to contain high-quality oil already commanding a premium at Salt Lake refineries.
With the secret out, industry players expect a bidding war to break out at the next Utah leasing auction, set for May 17 in Salt Lake City.
At today’s prices the oil reserve could bring Utah $5.6 billion in royalties, state auditors conservatively estimate. Although the discovery is still playing out, the oil will take years to recover and some skeptics question the company’s projections for a region yet to be fully surveyed.
“It’s just very highly unlikely because the U.S. onshore has been picked clean, if you will,” said Fadel Gheit, senior oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York.
(Excerpt) Read more at spokesmanreview.com ...
Nobody else with the slightest bit of oilfield knowledge will.
Since this is a small company, I smell scam ALL over it.
The ME consortiums isn't going to sit on their hands either...they have the estimates of their oil field reserves...and they know they cannot last forever.
There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of cubic feet of NG out there.
Of course "proposals" are one thing.....I figure there's awhole lot of "duck lining" to be done...With trillion$ at stake.
Interesting to see where it all leads........
FRegards,
And vice versa. There's probably a judge with a draft of his ruling already on a wordpad, just waiting for a few names, dates, and details to be filled in.
The Enviornmentalists do not favor more refining capacity. And at this time, neither do the oil companies.
Read some of the other posts, though. Folks are getting carried away.
This is a big find for a small company. It probably won't have any kind of a measurable impact on the price of oil, though.
When I heard that a small company had made a find in Utah, I got a bit excited because I have some stock in a small company that does some drilling in Utah. After I figured, out that it wasn't my company, I went to the website of the company I own to see if they had any wells in the area. They say on their website that they have a 2 billion barrel well in east Utah. Apparently, that is not as exciting though because they are not quite as small as Wolverine.
Very very true, What that dirtbag did to lock up all the land over those Clean Coal deposits was criminal
There is, particularly in oil shale. Given the right price and the technology, it will produce a lot of oil.
I find comments like this really tiresome. No single oil field is going to supply all our needs forever, anymore than any single farm is going to supply all of our food needs forever. Liberals are constantly Pooh Poohing new oil discoveries in this manner much like they tried to dismiss tax cuts as being enough to let some one buy a BigMac, or a muffler.
Very nice, if true. But it's a bit early to say, judging from this article.
It is not important that it would only last 50 days. It won't come online all at once anyway. Demand is relatively inelastic so a 1 or 2% shortfall can spiral prices. This field could provide a 1% cushion for more than 10 years. Coupled with Alaska crude it would be a buffer against price shocks. If we added 1% to the supply right now, oil prices would tumble.
Oh I think it's great that a small outfit can be successful and it's in AMERICA! A billion here, a billion there, before you know it, we're talking about REAL FINDS! LOL
"I would love to know what is going on with that oil in Iraq, Saddam managed to turn a profit"
They are doing very well, I believe the figure is around 2 million barrels a day...the high point when Hussein was in power was 2.3 million barrels a day, if memory serves...
I used to chukar hunt in Northern Nevada, up around the Black Rock Desert (Burning Man territory). The hills up there are chock-full of oil shale. We would build our campfire pits with it and the shale would ooze oil once the fire got going. Had to be careful, though--the rocks would explode if they got too hot!
"Wolverine..."
Sounds like it might be owned by some of my fellow alumni from the University of Michigan. I don't know how many owners there are, but at $50 a barrel, that might make 30 or so billionaires?
I had that thought too. If they're selling stock, then all the more so.
"Iraq's oil promise unfulfilled?"
The New York Times
With vast reservoirs of oil and the potential to rival Saudi Arabia, Iraq long has tantalized the world's energy industry.
But the new Iraqi government's glaring failure last week to agree on an oil minister and the sectarian bargaining over this crucial appointment, as well as the unabated insurgency, have been new reminders of the political faults that keep the country's petroleum promise unrealized.
"Unfortunately, oil in Iraq is being politicized more and more," Issam al-Chalabi, who was Iraq's oil minister in the late 1980s, told a conference of scholars and oil company executives in Washington in late April. "This is dangerous."
Chalabi, now a consultant based in Jordan and Baghdad, is not related to Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile who has been appointed interim oil minister.
As recently as April, a senior Iraqi leader evoked the eternal dream that Iraq could produce 10 million barrels a day - close to the Saudi levels - within 10 years to 15 years.
Far less progress than that could alter the global oil market and aid consumers everywhere. But production is limping along at about 2 million barrels a day, less than before the war, and even at that rate it may be causing long-term damage to poorly maintained fields.
U.S. officials had hoped that output at this stage would be at 3 million barrels a day, generating funds for reconstruction. That level of production also could reduce oil prices, a global source of inflationary pressure. But close to $2 billion worth of U.S. aid to the oil sector has brought only limited gains.
Sabotage of a pipeline to Turkey has choked off exports from Iraq's northern fields, around Kirkuk, and violence has slowed efforts to renovate the larger southern fields.
But even if the insurgency is tamed, oil experts say, Iraq will never receive the foreign investment and advanced technologies it needs until the country has a strategy and laws, ideally enshrined in a constitution, for developing hydrocarbons.
Whatever pattern Iraq chooses, it must be clearly delineated, industry executives say, with protections for foreign investors.
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2005/05/02/a2.int.oil.0502.html
One good well does not prove up a billion barrels of reserves.
As most of the posts on this thread reveal people really don't have a sense of scale regarding Saudi/Middle Eastern deposits relative to the stuff we have.
Saudi oil deposits are just incomprehensibly huge and require basically no effort to drill. It takes an awful, awful, awful lot to make more than a blip on the market.
Thanks so much for that info, I don't read the NYTimes and could not find any info anywhere. Closest I ever heard anything was Alan Colmes asking about the oil and nobody answered his question.
Well, the question is whether they actually only did one well. The article says that the test well was drilled in 2003. Apparently, the field had already been worked quite a lot anyway. They've had time to drill confirmatory wells.
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