A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released April 10, shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency’s 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil.
Technically recoverable oil resources are those producible using currently available technology and industry practices. USGS is the only provider of publicly available estimates of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas resources.
New geologic models applied to the Bakken Formation, advances in drilling and production technologies, and recent oil discoveries have resulted in these substantially larger technically recoverable oil volumes. About 105 million barrels of oil were produced from the Bakken Formation by the end of 2007.
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
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Whatever it is, it’s that much less not imported from the Middle East, and thank God for it.
I guess that you should go there then and tell all us who are drilling there today just what it is that we’re doing wrong.
The actual production figures fall seriously short of your data. We are producing about 150 thousand barrels per day from about 1200 wells.
Maybe if we plug your numbers into those wells, they will somehow double production.
Unfortunately greenie-weenies have financial backing from somewhere to have stopped the reopening of those wells.
Most of these lower producing conventional oil wells were capped back in the 90's when oil dipped to $17 / barrel.
The goobermint doesn't want the US to reopen these wells that in the lowest producing wells only have to pump 10 barrels a day to be profitable at $110/barrel.
This is a story the LSM isn't airing.