What They Aren’t Telling Us
Jul 31, 2009 Political
Boone Pickens has said, (among other things), that there is plenty of natural gas to power our power plants and our vehicles for at least a hundred years. Sarah Palin has touted the oil and gas reserves of Alaska as long as she has been governor. One person is listened to, and the other is ridiculed for saying the same thing, but one thing is becoming perfectly clear- the government does not want you to know the true state of our oil and gas reserves.
Oh, not the ones off of the East and West coasts- that is politically difficult- but the reserves in America’s heartland. These reserves they especially do not want you to know of.
North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.
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.
The USGS Bakken study was undertaken as part of a nationwide project assessing domestic petroleum basins using standardized methodology and protocol as required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 2000.
The Bakken Formation estimate is larger than all other current USGS oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest “continuous” oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. 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 undiscovered estimate of 1.0 billions of barrels of technically recoverable oil.
usgs.gov
3 to 4.3 billion barrels of oil- that is quite a bit of oil, and that doesn’t take into account the natural gas amounts that there might be. We are not running out of oil, so much as running out of political will. We would rather impoverish our people while trying, and failing, with untested pie in the sky so- called solutions to a crisis that we would not have if we as a people would wake up and smell the fossil fuel.
“It is clear that the Bakken formation contains a significant amount of oil – the question is how much of that oil is recoverable using today’s technology?” said Senator Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota. “To get an answer to this important question, I requested that the U.S. Geological Survey complete this study, which will provide an up-to-date estimate on the amount of technically recoverable oil resources in the Bakken Shale formation.”
The USGS estimate of 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil has a mean value of 3.65 billion barrels. Scientists conducted detailed studies in stratigraphy and structural geology and the modeling of petroleum geochemistry. They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates.
USGS worked with the North Dakota Geological Survey, a number of petroleum industry companies and independents, universities and other experts to develop a geological understanding of the Bakken Formation. These groups provided critical information and feedback on geological and engineering concepts important to building the geologic and production models used in the assessment.
usgs.gov
Now, I am not turning my back on wind, or solar, and especially not nuclear power, but we need to get our heads out of the clouds and back on firm ground. Right now, at this point in time, what we need is a national effort to find energy. The type of energy shouldn’t matter as much as obtaining the energy itself.
We, as a nation, need to position ourselves for the coming century- there are other countries hard on our heels, and if you don’t think our position in this world matters, you really need to go sit on the sidelines, because you will not be any help to your nation, or your family.
Diversification means that a multitude of options will be used- it does not mean to close off any options for consideration, and yet that is exactly what this administration would have us do when we have the resources, and we have the techniques, and we have the infrastructure in place.
This Bakken Formation could, along with Alaska’s gas reserves, give us the breathing room to diversify effectively, rather than impoverish ourselves in an attempt to have alternatives without the assistance of the existing power sources.
To read more about this, go here: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
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Tags: cap and tax, energy needs, fossil fuels, reserves