Study reveals huge U.S. oil-shale field

The Seattle Times ^ | Sep. 1, 2005 | Jennifer Talhelm

[Herosmith]

WASHINGTON — The United States has an oil reserve at least three times that of Saudi Arabia locked in oil-shale deposits beneath federal land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, according to a study released yesterday.

[HamiltonJay]

Well reality is, we aren't held hostage by the Middle East.. honestly I am more worried about that idiot down in Venezuala thatn I am the Middle East when it comes to oil supplies.

Yes, they contribute large amounts of OIL to us daily, but Canada and Mexico export moil oil to the US daily than the Persian gulf. 3.2 MBBL/D vs about 2.4 MBBL/D

Here's the DOE's #s from last month, in Thousands of bbl per day.


CANADA 1,705
MEXICO 1,616
SAUDI ARABIA 1,598
VENEZUELA 1,292
NIGERIA 1,012
IRAQ 608
ANGOLA 397
ALGERIA 292
ECUADOR 288
UNITED KINGDOM 269
COLOMBIA 227
BRAZIL 212
NORWAY 194
KUWAIT 184
CHAD 136

As you can see the VAST majority of oil is coming from THIS hemisphere, and from relatively stable countries.. Saudi Arabia is the one exception, and VENEZUALA is the true problem in terms of stability of supply.

Saudis, like them or not, are not unstable.

I agree I'd love to see SA replaced, and honestly, we produce nearly 50% of our oil consumption domestically.

We aren't beholden to the Arabs, obviously if we lost SA/IRAQ and KUWAITS oil it wouldn't be fun... but we should do more to tap existing reserves in NA/SA before subsidizing shale... that's a pretty big chunk, I estimate a $15/BBL subsidy would run us about $17 BILLION per year or more recurring cost.. MOney would be better spent finding and tapping liquid crude reserves in this hemisphere.

[Always Right]

Thanks for the breakdown. From the news you would think half our oil comes from the middle east.

[Cobra64]

I can't repeat what he said in regards to the oil companies ignoring this!!

Not all of them did. I lived in CO for 10 years, and at that time Exxon was in the process of building a huge community on the Western Slope, getting ready to gear up on extracting oil from the shale.

[HamiltonJay]

Oh, and just as an AHA/interesting point:

ANWR predicted production would range anywhere from 650 to 1,900 BBL/DAY... (DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY REPORT: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analysis_publications/arctic_national_wildlife_refuge/html/execsummary.html)

Which on the low end would replace ALL current IMPORTS from IRAQ.. and on the HIGH END, replace nearly ALL IMPORTS from SAUDI ARABIA & IRAQ combined.

Unfortunately though the report also states it will take an estimated 7 to 12 years to bring it online. So, just to give persepective, if it would tak 7-12 years to get a liquid reserve online... SHALE would be even longer.

[HamiltonJay]

that BBL/DAY should be THOUSANDs BBL/DAY

[TASMANIANRED]

The democrats will still try to prevent drilling.


There is a tremendous amount of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

The US could be energy independent and could also generate many thousands of jobs.

Democrats prevent it.

[Cobra64]

I have heard about massive reserves of shale oil since the days of Jimmy Carter...

I remember this too. I was living in CO at the time, and the majors began getting the extraction process going. Then the price of crude dropped like a stone after Ronnie deregulated Carter's shinannigans.

[Marauder]

What do you suppose the enviro-nazis (or their friends, the Saudis) would say about that?

"Allah be praised?"

There was some guy a few years back that was using huge banks of photvoltaic solar cells out in Arizona who was reportedly having some luck with this process, and I don't recall what happened to that project.

But since you seem much better-informed than I on the difficulty of this process, what about ethanol? I read somewhere that it's a lot cheaper to crack, but I don't remember the details.

[HamiltonJay]

The overwhelming amount of imports come from this hemisphere and stable countries.

ANWR as I stated before according to DOE reports would produce anywhere from what we are getting from IRAQ today to the combined total of IRAQ and SAUDI ARABIA once online based on their estimates.

Now yes, ANWR is not nearly the SIZE of those fields, but it certainly would produce oil for many years. The size of ANWR is 95% chance of being 5.7 Billion BBL of recoverable and 5% being 16 Billion bbl.

Using the MEAN estimates from the report, this reserve would produce at peak about 1 to 1.3 Million BBL/day and its mean estimated recoverable oil of 10 BILLION, means you are going to get about 10 years of production out of it...

SO ANWR doesn't end the issue, but it shows that we do have the capacity to replace middle east oil without going shale, if we decide to.

Obviously every drop of oil is important from an economic perspective... but Saudi Arabia isn't even the #1 oil importer to the US.. its not even the #2.

If we could get some political stability in Africa, lord knows how much crudes over there waiting to be tapped.

[sitetest]

Dear Always Right,

Yeah, but the problem is that it doesn't matter that half our oil doesn't come from the Middle East.

There are two problems. The first is that even the disruption of direct shipments from places like Saudi Arabia or Venezuela could be significant enough to badly harm us. Saudi Arabia sends us over 7% of our oil, and Venezuela sends us around 6%. And Mexico, at over 8%, is hardly a truly stable state.

Disruptions from any of these folks (or disruptions from the Persian Gulf due to a wider war, God forbid) would be very damaging to us directly.

How much production has been taken off-line, probably quite temporarily, from Katrina? And look at what that's done in the short-term. I paid $3.38 per gallon yesterday. Six months of that, and we will have ourselves a nice little recession.

But the second problem is that these folks just don't sell to us. If the Saudis went off-line, let's say because al-Qaeda overthrew the royal family, and shut off the taps, the world loses around 10 million barrels per day. That would be catastrophic. There are a bunch of countries who produce a million or more barrels per day, where if their production goes off-line for political reasons, the whole world market gets a good shaking. Especially right now, with growth in China (and ultimately India, too) creating long-term pressures on the ability of the oil markets to keep supply up with demand.

All this stuff may play out very quickly, and we may find ourselves overnight backed into a corner, from which it will take us some years to escape.

Or maybe it will all play out very slowly, over a matter of decades, so that we can live with the political, economic, social instability, with the need to fight a war here or there to defend our interests, with periodic oil shocks.


sitetest

[SampleMan]

If the claim of 10 year to begin production is true, continued waiting will keep our oil in the ground until a cheaper alternative to oil is produced. But still many here want to keep sending the oil royality payments to other governments instead of our own.

I'm not sure of your point. Are you saying that you want to lock the U.S. into using $100 a barrel domestic oil, regardless of world oil prices. Good luck selling that. Countries like Iran are far more dependent on exporting their oil than we are on importing it. Barring something very revolutionary, ships and airplanes will continue to require petroleum for hundreds of years. Most other energy requirements could be covered with nuclear, hydro, and geothermal. Don't we have the largest super volcano in the world in this country??? Let's tap a little of that heat.

[thackney]

I'm not sure of your point.

That is because I wrote it so poorly. What I was trying to say is I do not agree with the concept of paying other countries for more and more decades while we sit on our own. Alternative fuels and sources of petroleum are being developed. Fields like ANWR take time to bring to market. I do not believe we can determine market values and changing technology well enough to postpone our own oil production and still achieve maximum value. We just continue to build other countries up while we them send our cash.

[sitetest]

Dear thackney,

"We just continue to build other countries up while we them send our cash."

Indeed, and at current prices, we're sending them about $850 million per DAY. That's over $300 BILLION per year.


sitetest

[coconutt2000]

Canada's deposits are substantially different from those in the US. Their oil is in tar sands. Big difference from ours.

Ah, Arkie's right on this one. I made a mistake on that one.

[tiki]

Go get it. I know Colorado does pump some oil around Grand Junction but I don't know how much.

[thackney]

I wrote it so poorly

we them send our cash

sigh....

slow learner here I gues....

[Fierce Allegiance]

So why are we just hearing about it in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?

If this is the first you have heard of it, you need to get out from under that rock more often. I read about this crap when I was a kid.

[DHerion]

Now is the time to set a minimum price of oil in the U.S. - say $50 a barrel. Any time the price falls below that a tax kicks in. The money is later rebated to the American taxpayer - probably at the end of each year - around Christmas time would be best.

By setting the price at $50, rather than having it fluctuate between $20/30 to $70+ per barrel other alternate non mideast fuels will be profitable and become available.

[RightWhale]

Is this news? Maybe at the present cost of a barrel of oil this place is looking good, but it has been known for 1/2 century or more.