North Dakota oil discovery called biggest in U.S.
Posted
Apr 10 2008, 06:53 PM
by
Jon Markman
Rating:
Watch out, Texas! Get back California, Louisiana and Alaska! North Dakota and Montana are on track to knock all of you off your high horses as the oil capital of the United States.
According to a government report published today that has stunned the energy biz, a thin layer of rock known as the Bakken Shale, located a couple of miles under the Badlands, holds up 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil, making it the single largest oil reservoir that federal scientists have ever assessed.
At today’s price of $110 per barrel, that puts the value at $475 billion, give or take a few bill, or more than enough to make people think ND stands for North Dallas. Or maybe that’s New Dhabi.
The U.S. Geological Survey only assessed the Bakken Shale in U.S. boundaries, so the full extent of the find, which stretches north into the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, will ultimately be larger. Already the estimate for “technically recoverable” oil – or that which is exploitable using current technology -- is 25 times higher than the last time the USGS surveyed the area, in 1995.
Around 105 million barrels of oil had been produced from the Bakken through the end of 2007, so the idea that energy producers may get 40 times that amount has brought a lot of attention to the area’s top drillers and leaseholders. Investors pushed stocks like EOG Resources and Continental Resources to all-time highs in the past two weeks in anticipation of the report’s publication. See my column today, "Dakota Oil: Persia on the Plains," for more investment angles.
The USGS said in in its press release that its new Bakken estimate is larger than all of its other oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest "continuous" oil accumulation it has ever assessed. It said a "continuous" oil accumulation means that the oil resource is dispersed throughout a geologic formation rather than existing as discrete, localized occurrences. The next largest continuous oil accumulation in the U.S. is in the Austin Chalk of Texas and Louisiana, with an estimate of 1 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil.
Government geologists said they worked with North Dakota Geological Survey, a number of petroleum industry companies and independents, universities and other experts on the project. To hear a podcast of the USGS scientists Brenda Pierce and Rich Pollastro discussing their study, click here.
