Oil Deposit Could Increase US Reserves 10x

HighWizard notes the upcoming release, on Thursday, of a report by the US Geological Survey on the Bakken Formation. This is an oil field covering 200,000 square miles and underlying parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. A geologist who began surveying the field, before dying in 2000, believed it may hold as much as 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Later estimates have ranged to the hundreds of billions of barrels. Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence.

6000SUX

[Zymergy (803632)]

Awesome! ...And in the nick of time too, the dealer just called and my brand new 6000SUX just came in!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FLMVNyYb1SE [youtube.com]

Re:6000SUX

[bryce4president (1247134)]

Nice joke. But the real joke is the fact that people think our gasoline consumption has some huge effect on our oil usage. Actually our automobile fuel usage only accounts for 10% of our overall oil consumption. All those plastics that our cars are made of, and almost everything else we buy for cheap is made up come from petroleum :) So the next time you are asked paper or plastic? You might want to give paper another look. (after all, last year saw the first INCREASE in forest coverage from a previous year in quite a long time...so tress are on the rebound and reproduce much quicker than oil)

Re:6000SUX

[Slovenian6474 (964968)]

Last time I was at Wal-Mart and the lady started to put my purchases in a plastic bag, I said I can carry them myself. It was only a few things and an extra bag around would be slightly annoying. She replied with "That's good. Save a tree." I stopped for a second about to explain that the bag was made from petroleum, not trees. I would, infact, be saving oil. I decided not to say anything at all because my purchase consisted of several quarts of oil due to the fact that my car leaks oil like a sieve.

Only 10% of oil goes to automotive gasoline?

[cnaumann (466328)]

According to this cute chart:

http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/whats_in_barrel_oil.html

A little more than 50% of a barrel of oil becomes gasoline.

And this little tidbit from the plastics industry:

Less than .05% of a barrel of
oil goes into making all the plastic bags used in the US while 93% - 95% of every barrel of
crude oil is burned for fuel and heating purposes. Although they are made from natural gas or
oil, plastic bags actually consume less fossil fuels during their lifetime than do compostable
plastic and paper bags.

http://www.plasticsindustry.org/about/fbf/myths+facts_grocerybags.pdf

--

Seriously, how many pounds of plastic bags could you possibly be using in a year? How many pounds of plastic on in your car? A weekly 15 gallon fill-up is about 90 pounds of fuel, or a little less than 2.5 tons a year. My whole car doesn't weight that much, and most of it is steel.

Save your bags if it makes you feel good, but it ain't gonna make any real difference.

Re:Only 10% of oil goes to automotive gasoline?

[Bryansix (761547)]

Save your bags if it makes you feel good, but it ain't gonna make any real difference.

Actually the problem with plastic bags is a waste problem and not with how they are made. They are super efficient as carrying devices but then what? The catch a small breeze and now they are a litter problem bound to last for decades. The solution here is to use reusable bags. Also Ralph's (Kroger)has a program where each time you use a reusable bag you get 10 cents off the total of your purchases. I get 20 cents off each purchase because I have two of them. They pay for themselves in no time.

Re:Only 10% of oil goes to automotive gasoline?

[electrictroy (912290)]

I think he has a valid point; and all it takes is a little "back of the envelope" calculations:

- I burn about 1500 gallons of gasoline per year, which is around 7500 pounds of oil-based product.

- I use about 250 bags per year, which is perhaps 10 pounds of oil-based product.

Clearly the majority of my oil usage goes towards gasoline, and the plastic bag impact is negligible... just as the other guy was telling us.

Re:6000SUX

[mhall119 (1035984)]

You might want to replace that gasket.

Leave the Wal-mart employee alone.

Re:6000SUX

[LaskoVortex (1153471)]

That's actually stolen from a really old jokee

On the other hand, here is a shameless insertion of a new joke into the top of the /. heap:

In other news the newly formed state of Montkota is preparing to annex Saskatchewan and secede from the union. George bush has declared all Montkotans "terrorists" and is preparing to invade.

Re:Environmentalist nutjobs

[jtev (133871)]

We're talking midwest, not northeast. Trust me, there will be no trouble getting oil from there. This is "Flyover country" not "undisturbed wilderness" The buffalo have been long domesticated, and the native grass grows so fast that it has to be burned off each year to prevent REAL prarie fires. No real disruption of anything. I doubt it will be any more dificult than doing oil exploration in Oklahoma, and the Native Americans don't seem to have any issues with exploitation of the petrolium resources there. Now, getting the refineries built to deal with our new found wealth, that could be a problem, but just getting it, not so much.

We have more oil?

[symbolset (646467)]

I wonder what this does for theories of for oil. Some people theorize that petroleum is left over from the formation of the earth, rather than created by the fossilization of carbon life forms. [wikipedia.org]

This reserve may be difficult to tap fully because of the nature of the rocks. I wonder if nuclear weapons would help. I guess it depends on how and where they were deployed.

How many tons of CO2 would be created with the burning of 500 billion barrels of oil? BTW, 500 billion barrels of oil would be about 1/6th of the world's oil reserves.

Is there really that much oxygen in the atmoshpere to burn all that? Let's see. The earth's atmosphere weighs 5 quadrillion metric tons... [wikipedia.org] OK, no worries there.

but, but, the global warmings! The sea level could rise 50 feet in the next century. [checks current elevation of homestead] OK, that's fine.

But it would be hot! [checks average temps for homestead] ok, yeah, I can get behind that.

What about the polar bears? [checks polar bear shares in 401K] We're looking good!

But the crops! The crops won't grow! [Checks map of world showing land in permafrost [uwsp.edu]] Looks like a net gain to me.

Ok, yeah! We have more oil! Can we exploit it faster than we have more people?

Re:We have more oil?

[nmb3000 (741169)]

I wonder if nuclear weapons would help.

Perhaps you can explain--exactly under what circumstances do nuclear weapons not help?

That said, those sound like fightin' words so I'd be careful. We might not have much up in Montana, but we do have nukes. Some 200 ICBMs [nukewatch.com] with several MIRVs to be exact. You want our oil? Come and get it!

Re:We have more oil?

[Itchyeyes (908311)]

I'm a petroleum engineer who works for an independent oil and gas company that has recently become active in the Bakken formation in North Dakota. So let me try and answer these questions one by one.

I wonder what this does for theories of for oil. Some people theorize that petroleum is left over from the formation of the earth, rather than created by the fossilization of carbon life forms. [wikipedia.org]

This theory is complete and utter bunk. Nobody, and I really mean nobody, seriously invested in the search for petroleum reserves subscribes to it. The Bakken is a traditional petroleum reservoir where the hydrocarbons are created by biological matter subject to intense heat and pressure.

The reason that the Bakken is just now considered a viable reservoir is not because more oil has been generated but because the technology and price of oil have advanced enough to where it's now a viable and economic source of oil. The current buzz about the Bakken is specifically relegated to horizontal wells, a technology that has just recently come into its own.

This reserve may be difficult to tap fully because of the nature of the rocks. I wonder if nuclear weapons would help. I guess it depends on how and where they were deployed.

I'm assuming this is a joke, but nuclear weapons have actually been tested in oil fields to increase production. Traditionally, a well is hydrolicaly fractured with pressure to increase the permiability of the rock and increase the ease in which the hydrocarbons can flow. However, explosives can produce a similar result. Nuclear explosives though are actually poor tools to fracture a well with since the intense heat "glasses" the rock and prevents flow.

How many tons of CO2 would be created with the burning of 500 billion barrels of oil? BTW, 500 billion barrels of oil would be about 1/6th of the world's oil reserves.

Fewer than would be produced generating the same amount of energy with coal, which currently provides about 70% of our energy in the US. Even if we all decide today that we're going to swear off fossil fuels, the process of converting our society to the alternatives will take decades, decades in which we will still rely on millions of barrels of oil every day.

I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese

[Travoltus (110240)]

And in China they say "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

So it takes decades to convert our society to renewable energy. That means we start TODAY. In earnest.

The conversion of America to alternative, clean, renewable energy (and not the Ethanol Scam) is an engineering and collective will issue, not a scientific issue.

If I were President, my plan would be to take a manual transmission approach to the issue.

Here's how my "Manhattan Project" would go:

Gear 1 - the quick, short term stuff. Corporate tax breaks and subsidies for electric car production. Electric cars have existed - even electric SUV's (the old RAV-4, anyone? Don't tell me I'm wrong, I NOW HAVE ONE - they're just not being made anymore).

Tax breaks and rebates for solar energy panels on houses and apartments. BIG breaks and rebates, proportional to the kilowatt/hour rating of the installed system. We fund this tax break by stimulating the economy - solar energy purchases and then the resulting rise in consumer spending as energy prices decrease ESPECIALLY DURING THE BOILING HOT SUMMER.

Start funding and constructing pebble bed nuclear power plants. Go bare knuckle with the environmentalists. James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia Theory, supports this as an intermediate step towards cleaner, more renewable energy in the future. This should take 20-30 years to realize the benefits. Best to start now.

Gear 2 - Incentives for solar powered electric chargers for gas stations to power up electric cars. Make use of the existing infrastructure to change the infrastructure.

Start construction on a 500 sq mile solar farm in a sunny, remote location. Or break up said solar farm into several sunny locations around the country. This is enough power for the entire world during the day.

Slowly phase out coal power plants when exceeded by its solar cousins, but leave enough to take care of night time/bad weather issues.

Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars.

Gear 3 - A nationwide "give back to the power grid" incentive for homes. Basically, people who generate solar power on their rooftops while they are at work and nothing's going on in their house, profit when they're using no power and their solar panels are pumping energy back into the grid. They get 100% MARKET VALUE for that energy - exactly 1 for 1 versus what they would pay if they used it. Adjusted daily, weekly or monthly, however it goes.

Bigger Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars. Performance based. Now we start pushing for conversions of the big haulers (big rigs), as well as pushing them to bio diesel with emphasis on converting used veggie oil, etc.

Gear 4 - the first pebble bed nuclear plants go online. Drastic "as immediate as possible" cutbacks in coal and oil powered plants but not enough to completely offset the new nuclear plants.

More Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for electric and biodiesel-powered big rigs. Performance based.

Gear 5 - shutdown of all remaining polluting (Coal/Oil) power plants as all planned nuclear reactors go online and the solar farms are up, and over 50% of all US homes are solar powered.

Hopefully at this point we won't need Government contracts for high miles-per-charge cars; the market should reach critical mass. Research for electric and biodiesel powered big rigs continues until every new rig produced runs on one or the other.

Manhattan project complete. The big mushroom cloud you see is the giant earth-shattering KABOOM that is OPEC corporate heads exploding along with their profits.

Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese

[moosesocks (264553)]

Solar cannot replace Coal. It's completely unsuitable for supplying base-load power because it only works half the time (at best).

Right now, nuclear is the only viable alternative to coal that we have. Based upon the proposals for new plants to be constructed, it looks like Nuclear is quickly becoming the preferred source for new construction. It won't happen overnight, but I'm confident that we're moving in the right direction.

Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese

[drsmithy (35869)]

Invest in decent public transport. There should be no _need_ for anyone living within 10-20km of the centre of any reasonably large city (few hundred thousand people and up) to own a car.

Re:biotic origin

[Itchyeyes (908311)]

The current reservoir rock at the North Pole was not actually located at the North Pole when it formed millions of years ago. See plate tectonics [wikipedia.org].

Re:We have more oil?

[dbIII (701233)]

I'd love to see geo/nuclear energy widespread

Here's an interesting geothermal/nuclear tie in. Proposed expansion of the Olympic Dam uranium mine in the state of South Australia is going to require electicity equivalent to 75% of South Australia's current electricity production. There are currently experiments in geothermal electricity production being conducted a few hundred kilometres away from the mine which could possibly power it. People tend to forget that nuclear power comes from rock that you have to get out of the ground with effort and not some magic bean.

To complete the circle the hot wet rock was found during exploration of a nearby oilfield. The rock is actually hot due to natural nuclear activity but that is another story.

Re:We have more oil?

[spun (1352)]

People tend to forget that nuclear power comes from rock that you have to get out of the ground with effort and not some magic bean.

Are you sure? Look, everyone knows magic beans grow very big very fast. The only other thing I know that grows that big or that fast is Godzilla. Who got that way from radiation. Ergo, the beans must be radioactive.

Obviously, we should grow more of these beans.

Re:We have more oil?

[BlueParrot (965239)]

Well, technically we have already mined enough uranium that if we would just quit this retarded scheme where we use 1% of it and then throw it away we'd be set for centuries. Uranium mining continues because it is presently cheaper than reprocessing spent fuel, not out of necessity. Take my home country, Sweden, as an example. Over the lifetime of the present generation of nuclear reactors ( 60 years ) we will have built up some 12.000 metric tonnes of spent fuel rods. 96% of that spent fuel is still Uranium and actinides, which if recovered and fissioned would release enough energy to keep the reactors running for a millennium and a half. Of course, this is before we take into consideration that for each unit of enriched uranium fuel there will be several units of depleted uranium ( which can also be fissioned in fast reactors ) thus extending the resource further. Simply put, existing technology could supply our present energy demand for thousands of years without any mining. You would have to construct a waste repository, which over a few thousand years would accumulate the enormous amount of waste equal to about the amount of milk we consume in a single month.

Now, obviously this is a quantity which is far larger than what we could possibly figure out a way to safely store given 40 - 50 centuries of scientific development, so instead our energy plan is based on the idea that if we subsidize wind power for sufficiently long, they can indefinitely continue to increase in efficiency at the same rate as they have done historically (never mind that pesky theorem of fluid dynamics which sets a theoretical limit at about twice of present achievements ). /rant

Re:We have more oil?

[Itchyeyes (908311)]

I'm continually stunned by the abundance of misinformation our there about how oil is produced and distributed.

First of all, most of our oil does not [doe.gov] come from Canada and Mexico. And a lot of it does come from the Middle East and our foreign policy does have a big impact on it.

Secondly, yes Exxon made $40 billion in profits last year. They also spend somewhere around $400 billion to make those profits. Big numbers mean nothing unless you put them in perspective. A 10% profit margin is nothing special.

Thirdly, there is no oil monopoly. Oil companies do not calude with each other, they compete. The oil industry is infinitely deeper than Exxon, Chevron, and BP. There are hundreds, if not thousands of independent oil and gas companies in the US alone. The people that have interests in the Bakken in North Dakota are not the majors. They are companies like EOG, Marathon, Kodiak, and Questar. These companies do not have refineries. They sell at the market price, they have no say in what their product goes for. They do not have enough reserves to make any impact on market prices even if they wanted to.

Re:We have more oil?

[Itchyeyes (908311)]

Just read the numbers. Canada and Mexico account for 35% of our oil imports. Is that a lot, sure it is. But is it anywhere near most of our oil? No. What's more, the GP was making this point to support his idea that events in the Middle East do not affect our oil supply. But the #2 provider of US oil imports is Saudi Arabia at 17%.

Re:We have more oil?

[Itchyeyes (908311)]

There might be thousands of companies looking for and collecting the crude, but only a handful refine it into fuel and fewer yet sell that fuel to us. Fat lot of good having lots of competition in the crude arena is when they all have just a few significant customers (refiners and marketers). The market can be controlled from both the supply and demand side you know.

This just isn't true. Like with the producers most people have absolutely no idea how competitive and varied oil refineries are. Here [wikipedia.org] is a list of all US oil refineries and their production. From that list, these are the top 10 and their percentages of the US market.

Valero 13.1%
Conoco Phillips 11.7%
ExxonMobil 11.2%
BP 8.3%
Chevron 5.6%
Marathon 5.4%
Citgo 4.5%
Sunoco 4.5%
Shell 4.5%
Motiva 4.5%

None of these companies could be considered to be in a market dominating position, and 3, including Valero which has the largest market share, were never even part of Standard Oil. Additionally, there are some 50 other companies that control the remaining 27% of oil refining capacity in the US. People like to think of the oil industry as one unanimous big bad wolf, but that just isn't the reality of the situation.

Re:The real question is *SHOULD* you use it

[tacocat (527354)]

Well of course we should use it.

We're going to need every drop of it to invade all the other oil producing nations so we'll have even more oil. All sarcasm aside, this is a really going to be a set back to the American economy in the long run.

While we are spending our time and money pulling oil out of the ground we are not going to be making any effort to develop alternatives, while the rest of the world (except China) is actually going to work on developing alternative energies.

At some point we need to address the question of whether it's more important to lower the price of gas at the pump or take measures to develop more sustainable alternatives while we still have some oil to fall back onto. Alternatives to oil are not limited to the fuel pump, but all applications of oil. And plastic is going to be a hard one to replace.

Re:The real question is *SHOULD* you use it

[Xarin (320264)]

A lot of people question the wisdom of continuing the oil economy, there just aren't a lot of clear cut answers. There are a lot of possibilities, and a lot of people are working hard to make those possibilities a reality, but at the moment nothing is really ready to take oil's (and for that matter coal's) place in our energy production on a large enough scale.

The real issue is that US dollars are no longer backed by gold but by oil. Oil is priced, bought and sold with dollars. This is how the dollar gets its value and one reason other governments must hold dollars as a reserve currency. It also allows the US government to print a lot of dollars without any ill effects as they are taken out of the US economy and held/spent abroad. They then are repatriated by being spent on US Treasury bonds which pays for the dollars being printed backwards. The US is like the ticket booth at a fair. It prints and sell the tickets while the rest of the world spends it on the rides. To eliminate oil is to effectively eliminate the dollar and to eliminate the dollar and replace it with another currency such as the euro is to effectively eliminate US sovereignty as its economic policies will no longer be solely its own. It may also lead the US to abandon its debt obligations to the peril of banks, Social Security, pensions etc. One should not cut off one of the branches that the world economy is sitting on without seriously considering the implications.

Re:We have more oil?

[Simon (815)]

Why do you think planning things decades ahead works? Why do you think we'd make better decisions than the ones we did make?

Ok, so you are saying that we didn't know decades ago that being dependent on oil [wikipedia.org] might be a bad idea and that we should try to get off it?

--
Simon

Re:We have more oil?

[aurispector (530273)]

I can actually *remember* the lines to fill up . All the arguments about energy policy here are bunk except for one; cost, pure and simple. With oil, you stick a big straw in the ground and suck it out, then boil it to break it down into gas and stuff. Then you put it in your car and burn it. Nothing else is that cheap or simple and has as much energy per gallon.

The hidden advantage of the current prices is that other technologies become economically viable for development. Besides, there's plenty of OIL right now - current high gas prices are due to a relative lack of refining capacity. I'd bet that when gas hits $5 a gallon in the US, suddenly new refineries will spring up, but also more alternate energy sources will become competitive. THIS IS THE KEY. Once it's really worth it to try out new technologies (a prius does not yet save you money in terms of total cost of ownership), we hit critical mass for research and funding and the market takes care of the rest. Economies of scale will reduce the costs and after a while oil isn't all that profitable, especially when the easily pumped deposits dwindle and it's more expensive to suck it out of the ground.

Re:We have more oil?

[RatPh!nk (216977)]

We actually have plenty of refining capacity.

I just want to point this out:

The US total refining capacity was 17,443,492 barrels of oil/day, which yields on average, 340,148,094 gallons @19.5gallons gas/barrel of oil. The current consumption of gas in the US is 388.6 million gallons/day (as of 2006)

If those numbers are correct, we are at a 48,451,906 gallon/day shortfall of US domestic production capacity. Since no one wants a refinery in their backyard, there hasn't been a new one built since the 1970's (The last refinery built in the US was in Garyville, Louisiana, and it started up in 1976.)

So "we" as in the US, have a serious lack of refinery capacity.

Sources:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/quickfacts/quickoil.html [doe.gov]
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/eng99/eng99288.htm [anl.gov]
http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/ntn12966.htm [gasandoil.com]

Fungible

[corsec67 (627446)]

Too bad oil is fungible [wikipedia.org], so OPEC can still hurt us monetarily.

So, how far back does this push "peak oil"?

Re:Exactly

[whatnotever (116284)]

For those of you that think it has any validity, try this 6 step experiment.

1) Get a drinking straw.
2) Go to a pool.
3) Start sucking the water out of the pool as fast as you can with that straw. (You probably should not swallow the water)
4) Go to the ocean.
5) Start sucking the water out of the ocean as fast as you can with the same straw. (You definitely should not swallow the water)
6) Now explain to us all how the amount of water that you sucked through the straw was dictated by reserve you are pulling from.

Or try this experiment:

1) Get a drinking straw.
2) Get a really big sponge really soaking wet.
3) Start sucking the water out of the sponge as fast as you can with that straw.
4) If you start getting less water, try a different spot on the sponge.
5) Marvel at how thought experiments can prove anything you want if they are divorced enough from the phenomenon of interest, but note that mine is probably closer to the reality of oil extraction than yours is.

Securing energy independece...until it's gone

[RedSteve (690399)]

Even if the field is as productive as the summary makes it sound, it should be treated as a reprieve, not as an absolute solution.

Re:Securing energy independece...until it's gone

[I Like Pudding (323363)]

WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA?

Dear Canada,

[circletimessquare (444983)]

Dear Canada,

Concerning this oilfield which lays below the Dakotas and Saskatchewan: if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that's a straw, you see? You watching? And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake... I... drink... your... milkshake! SLURP I drink it up!

Bludgeonly yours,
the USA

Re:Dear Canada,

[Itchyeyes (908311)]

The process described in "There Will be Blood" has long since been outlawed. Oil fields are carefully regulated to ensure that wells are properly spaced and not draining neighboring owner's reserves.

Re:Dear Canada,

[big_paul76 (1123489)]

Dear USA:
      That may be true, but thanks to the Alberta oil boom of late, we are the current leading edge of new tech for recovery of non-standard types of oil. If you want to have a race to see who can get it out first, we'll even give you a 2-year head start, just to make it sporting.

Yes, yes, we all know you could invade us without breaking a sweat, but can you live without the oil coming in from Alberta? How about the electricity that comes from James Bay Hyrdo? If you wanna see what life would be like without it, imagine everything east of Chicago living under a blackout. Yes, you have a great big expensive army, but I don't think you have enough troops to protect 2000 miles of power lines from being dynamited.

Oh, yeah, and we're a nuclear 'threshold' country, so we could fire up a nuke and a delivery vehicle that could hit Washington in 2 or 3 years max. So draw when ready, pardner.

Sincerely,
The Dominion of Canada.

Re:Dear Canada,

[Surt (22457)]

No worries, she's talented.

Ssh! Don't tell anybody!

[flyingfsck (986395)]

We got to finish off the Arab oil first, to reduce their political influence in the world.

Re:Ssh! Don't tell anybody!

[wces423 (686579)]

dude, the reserve might be connected to Arab oil reserve under ground. You may consider yourself to be wise-ass for not consuming it but in reality you can be a dumb-ass buying your own oil from middle-east.

More info needed

[Anna Merikin (529843)]

Last I heard -- a long, long time ago -- extraction of shale oil deposits required abundant water, as the technology then used steam to liquify the oil and release it from the shale.

Last I heard, there was not abundant water in the area of the deposits. If a /. reader with recent expertise in the extraction of oil from shale would post a reply on the most recent technologies and the free or cheap water requirement, I would be, as they say in the Western Movies, "beholden."

Otherwise, like those in California's Central Valley, the extent and practical worth of such deposits is debatable.

Of course, we can hope.

Wow, imagine what this will do for gas prices!

[epp_b (944299)]

Absolutely nothing!

Oil Dependance

[by Anonymous Coward]

This is inaccurate:

"Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence."

This is correct:

"Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy dependency on oil."

And in other news ...

[Skapare (16644)]

... Canada has just begun to beef up the military defenses on its long southern border.

Re:Nice

[snl2587 (1177409)]

I'm not going to hold my breath.

I wouldn't. Even with that much oil it still is going to run out someday. If anything we should leave it alone for now to ensure that we don't end up with massive shortages as we transition to alternative fuel sources.

Re:At what cost?

[SpryGuy (206254)]

So what IS the cost, per barrel, of pulling it out of the ground?

It's literally pennies to pull it out in Kuwait. But Oil is trading for over $100/barrel now. So if the costs are anything up to about $50/barrel to recover, there's still some profit motive left to go after it.

I've read all sorts of numbers, but I'm wondering at what point it becomes desirable, not just feasable, to go after that oil and start exploiting those fields.

And then there's the conspiracy theorist in me who wonders if they aren't purposely driving hte price of oil up in order to make exploiting domestic oil that much more realistic, and thus wean us off the foreign teat...

Re:At what cost?

[Itchyeyes (908311)]

A horizontal Bakken well costs about $5 million to drill and about $7000/month to operate. Most of these wells are economic at around $70/bbl.

Re:Uhhh, What?

[ZachPruckowski (918562)]

Energy Independence is completely separate from clean energy. Energy Independence means that the Middle East doesn't have the power to stop our economy instantly. Clean energy means energy that is less pollutant. The two are often used together because the adoption of clean energy brings energy independence (since most clean energy solutions can be implemented in the US). Thus clean energy implies energy independence, but not vice-versa.

Re:Uhhh, What?

[ZachPruckowski (918562)]

Oil demand in the US is pretty inelastic in the short term. This means that people will pay whatever they have to keep the heat running in their homes or to drive to work/school. If oil prices rise 50%, demand might fall 5% or 10% (as people lower the thermostat or skip driving to the gym).

As a result, if oil supply dropped by even 25% (as it did during the Yom Kippur War embargo in 1973), it would take drastic measures to reduce consumption by 25%. Like shutting factories, gas rationing at the pumps, closing schools in the winter, massive inflation (as transportation costs skyrocket), all kinds of bad stuff. In the long term, people buy more efficient cars or heat-proof their houses, but in the short term, only the most painful of measures can reduce consumption.

National Energy Independence means avoiding this. If multinational corporations threatened to reduce US oil output by 25% if their demands weren't met, we'd have troops nationalizing the oil fields within 72 hours.

Re:Giant shale fields...

[Itchyeyes (908311)]

I think you're confusing oil shale with plain old shale. The Bakken is a traditional shale formation, so recovery costs are not that high. Wells are generally economic as long as the price of oil stay above around $70/bbl. And no this won't make the Dakota's like West Virginia. The reason the Bakken is now economic is because of advances in horizontal drilling. When wells are drilled horizontally they are spaced much farther apart. Currently Bakken wells in North Dakota are drilled about 1 to every square mile. A standard oil well will take up about 3-5 acres of surface area in that square mile.

Re:100 Billion Barrels of Greenhouse Gases

[dasunt (249686)]

One of the more intriguing ideas I've heard is to seed the deep ocean with iron.

Iron is a limiting factor in the growth of plankton, especially in the resource poor areas of the ocean.

Add iron, plankton grows. Plankton absorbs CO2, then dies, sinking.

Re:100 Billion Barrels of Greenhouse Gases

[MadMorf (118601)]

Add iron, plankton grows. Plankton absorbs CO2, then dies, sinking.

Nope. Plankton dies, releasing organo-phophates and nitrogen compounds into the water, which causes bacterial blooms, which depletes dissolved O2 levels, which causes other marine lifeforms to die, initiating a downward spiral...

Not a marine biologist, but a marine aquarium owner. Been there, done that.

Re:Bring the boys back home, send em up N

[Rei (128717)]

B) This is about oil reserves INSIDE THE UNITED STATES

Actually, the Bakken formation extends into Canada, too.

The Bakken has a rather interesting history. Estimates on how much oil it produced have varied a lot. Back in the '70s, they thought it only had about 10B barrels -- which is a lot, but not when it's spread out over such a huge formation. To make matters worse, the formation is a dozen meters or so thick in most places. All together, recovery rates were expected to be 1-3%, and expensive at that. Not many takers.

Things have changed. After Price's paper that predicted over 400 billion barrels, computer simulations have been developed; the latest runs expect 200-300 billion barrels. Furthermore, horizontal drilling means that you can enter the thin formation and then run along it; this is what is used in the very successful Elm Coulee field [wikipedia.org].

The Bakken is just one minimally tapped deposit. There's absolutely no shortage of recoverable oil [daughtersoftiresias.org] in the world. The problem is the consequences of recovering and burning it all.

C) The US is moving to 'alternative fuels'. The debate is not over whether or not to, but how big a priority it is.

Are you kidding? There's a huge debate over whether or not to, especially after the most recent papers suggesting that even sugarcane ethanol leads to more greenhouse gasses than gasoline. Let alone the fact that there's a widely growing acceptance that, despite the momentum, corn ethanol is a huge blunder. There's the food-for-fuel competition (food prices are up 40% [mongabay.com], mostly from fuel prices and alternative fuel pressure). Now, I think it's good that corn prices aren't as artificially low as they used to be, but now they're artificially high, and everything is getting pushed up by the increased demand for biofuel land -- even other staples like wheat.

And what about cellulosic ethanol, this supposed panacea? This is one thing that drives me crazy. Look at how most big cellulosic ethanol companies are making the stuff. They turn the biomass into syngas (CO+H2) by burning it in a poorly oxygenated environment, and then use a complex, inefficient biological or catalytic process to convert it into ethanol. Well, here's the thing: we've been making syngas into *gasoline* for most of a century. That's how Nazi Germany and Apartheid-era South Africa kept their engines running (excepting, in the case of Germany, after we bombed most of their facilities). And it's a relatively efficient -- 70% or so. So, instead of making a fuel that we're *already set up for*, we're instead making a *less dense* fuel that we can only use in *limited quantities* in most cars and *can't ship in our pipelines*. Why? Because "cellulosic gasoline" isn't a buzzword. Nobody likes the word "gasoline", but lots of people like the word "ethanol". You get more investment, you get more tax breaks, and on and on. So the inferior solution gets chosen.

Anyways, if you want to *actually* clean up your act, either increase your MPG or switch your miles over to electricity (the significantly higher thermodynamic efficiencies of power plants mean that even dirty power plants run a car cleaner [pnl.gov] than a gasoline engine -- plus, electricity is a lot easier to clean up). Biofuels are an "easy" solution that isn't really a solution at all.