Posted on 03/28/2008 9:59:13 AM PDT by a real Sheila
America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.
In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated
(Excerpt) Read more at nextenergynews.com ...
—That’s true, but if really huge new sources were developed outside of OPEC, the law of supply and demand dictates the price would drop.—
Which is why the oil industry never runs commercials about the benefits of drilling in ANWR or the coasts, but runs lots of drivel about being “green.”
In May of that year I was at a DEWLIne site where I could observe the spring migration of the caribou herds. It was a magnificent migration as they came down out of the Brooks Range.
The herd, that year was estimated to be about 24,000. The most recent census is about 125,000. Why the increase?
The oil pipeline had to be elevated since the oil comes out of the ground at 300 degrees F since the oil strata is over a magma pocket.
Park rangers noticed that after the pipeline was built the caribou, who are much smarter than the envirowackos!, would stay huddled under the pipe during their winter stay up in the Brooks range meadows. Caribou live longer, less infant mortality, and so it goes. More fox, wolves, rabbits, birds and all attributed to the pipeline!
Drill in the ANWAR is the answer!
I was here during the War of Northern Aggression.
Just under a different screen name.
Those were some wild times here at FR.
Well...maybe Saint Hillary can run out real quick after getting elected and declare the entire area Grand Staircase Escalande II...that way all that oil will be nice and safe, OPEC will be secure in it’s wealth, and the bunnies will feel all warm and fuzzy.
...in a perfectly bizzaro world
And ask them what happens when the natural gas runs out.
We have plenty of oil at Chushing OK and the refineries are running at 83% - the price of gas should drop like a stone if every we had pricing based upon true supply and demand.
What I mean by that is one is used to extract the other. Oil extraction in Alberta’s a complicated business dependent upon the supply of gas and hot water to make it work.
still takes something pressurized to get it moving. that’s the big problem I presume.
thanx—have a great one:-)
FReegards!
A “credible threat” has to have teeth. That means actual capital investment in recovery. Enough capital investment to make a offset significant demand from OPEC might be hundreds of billions of dollars.
That is what is being invested into oil sands recovery in Alberta Canada, and the end result still won’t be much output compared to OPEC.
Private enterprise is afraid to invest too rapidly and build recovery capacity too rapidly, because they risk OPEC doing exactly what you say — dumping cheap oil on the markets to drive the domestics into bankruptcy. It would be good for consumers of oil to get lower prices, but bad for the investors that spent money on infrastructure that is then unprofitable.
I think a possible solution would be for the Federal government to place an open bid for domestically produced oil — say a billion barrels per year guaranteed to renew for 20 years — at a price high enough to yield a profit to the oil companies in the event they cannot sell it for more than that on the world markets. If oil companies were guaranteed a buyer-of-last-resoort at $35, then their investment in infrastructure couldn’t go down the tubes by something OPEC does. The Federal government would only actually buy the oil if the oil company couldn’t sell it for more than that. In that event, the government would take a loss when they had to buy it at $35 and then sell it themselves for less. The maximum loss would be $35B/yr, but for that to happen the market price of oil would have to have hit ZERO. Obviously not going to happen. It likely wouldn’t cost the taxpayer much if anything, but it might influence the market by protecting domestic oil producers from OPEC dumping cheap oil on the markets to drive the domestics into bankruptcy.
Hi, preacher! Glad to know what I said was right! Wish Congress had such good information (LOL). They don’t really care about our country. They have their own agenda (communist/socialist) and they don’t want to hear the truth.
I appreciate your story. M
I’m surprised the enviro-wackos are not saying “The carribou numbers are too HIGH thanks to the pipeline and many are now STARVING to death!
Is that the temp for all oil when it comes out of the ground? How come you don’t see folks running and screaming from being scalded in film footage of oil workers being showered by a gusher?
I remember a geologist who was describing the oil strata. It seems that below the oil strata the was a tear in the Earth's Mantel and a pocket of magma had formed. The strata was such that this magma never made it to the surface to form a volcano. However, it did heat the oil! This was an unusual circumstance geologically speaking. Not all oil strata are the same.
Install a small nuke plant, and you will have all the steam you would ever want to keep the oil moving
North Dakota may be bigger oil player than Alaska
Bismarck Tribune ^ | 20 June '06 | LAUREN DONOVAN
****************************EXCERPT INTRO********************
A geologist who estimated the Bakken formation in western North Dakota has far more oil than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge died before other scientists could authenticate his study.
Leigh Price, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, published a study in 1999 that estimates the Bakken shales formation, which underlies much of several western and northwestern counties, may hold up to 400 billion barrels of oil.
By comparison, the Arctic refuge oil reserve is estimated at 16 billion barrels.
Now, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., is pushing the federal agency to complete scientific work on Price’s paper as part of a national inventory of the nation’s oil resources.
The Bakken formation is being developed to some extent in North Dakota, but with better success so far on the Montana side of the formation.
Recently, Marathon Oil, a major national and international oil developer, acquired 200,000 mineral acres from Billings to McKenzie counties and plans to drill as many as 300 wells into the Bakken in the next five years.
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