Bakken: The Biggest Oil Discovery in U.S. History

The Bakken oil formation, which stretches across North Dakota, Montana and southeastern Saskatchewan, is suddenly drawing worldwide attention.

On Thursday, April 10, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) published an official study on the massive Bakken reserve.

Among the agency's findings:

* Up to 4.3 billion barrels of oil could be recovered from the Bakken shale formation -- a 25-fold increase compared to its initial assessment in 1995.

* The Bakken is the largest "continuous" oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS.

This comes after a 2006 report by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which stated, "A study provides estimates ranging up to 503 billion barrels of potential resources in place."

Looks like peak oil will have to wait a while, Brazil now say they have discovered a new field off of the Brazilian coast said to contain 30+ billion barrels. More here and here.

So ... How Much Oil ?

The report from USGS is due tomorrow that takes a guess at the potential for oil recovery from the Bakken Filed I talked about in this post. Anticipation is rampant, it could be huge. But as estimates go, the North Slope has yielded about 3 times the original estimate. You can guess between 10 and 500 billion barrels. The North Slope original estimate was 10 billion barrels.

We should know tomorrow... stay tuned.

Massive Oil Find In North Dakota

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.

The new technology is a combination of what I had talked about in this post. There are some differences, but the main drilling is the same. The main idea is to 'turn the drill hole horizontal'. In the case of the new find, this is necessary because the oil is about two miles below a lake created by the Federal Government for water storage in the 1950s, Lake Sakakawae. The fracturing is an added feature designed to add contact area between the drill hole and the oil reservoir, not needed at this particular oil find.

However it's done, the find is looking huge. The oil reservoir was known to exist some time back, but drilling technology wouldn't allow for exploitation, drilling would have to be done in Lake Sakakawae, which could pollute the water. But slant drilling two miles under the lake is not going to disturb the water or effect water quality.

How big is this? Really really big. As much as 10 times the proven reserves of the USA -- 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. Today Saudi Arabia has about 260 billion barrels proven reserves.

AP story is here.