Oil Deposit Could Increase US Reserves 10x 869
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.
Re:Nice (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The $100+ Million Question (Score:3, Informative)
Re:100 Billion Barrels of Greenhouse Gases (Score:1, Informative)
Then prepare to die. The US consumes 20 million barrels a day. It would take 50 days -- two months -- to consume a billion. 200 months is 17 years.
As for this find: yawn. Call us when it's a trillion barrels -- hundreds of years at current consumption rates.
Re:We have more oil? (Score:5, Informative)
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]
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.
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.
This is not a problem (Score:2, Informative)
The region has sufficient water to deal with this issue. There are challenges here but his is not one of them.
There is also enough geothermal energy here that we don't even need the petroleum if we could convert and store it properly.
Re:Uhhh, What? (Score:5, Informative)
An oil shale field, not an oil field (Score:3, Informative)
Extracting oil from oil shale in the most obvious way involves heating it (probably with oil, but you do get more out than you put in, usually). So, you scoop it out of the massive open-pit mine, heat it, get the oil out, and then dispose of the remaining rock. Paradoxically, you end up changing the nature of the rock, so that it takes up more space than it originally did -- so even if you put all the tailings back into where it was mined, you'd end up with a new set of mountains. The net energy you end up with after processing the oil shale isn't a lot, and ridiculous amounts of water are necessary in the process (water the mountain west just doesn't have.)
It should be noted that the Canadians are talking about building nuclear plants in their tar sands regions to supply the energy necessary to liberate the oil from the tar sands, in sort of a nuclear->oil scheme.
According to the Wikipedia article, there have been oil shale processing programs in the past, some on a fairly large scale. They have fallen by the wayside as conventional oil has been so inexpensive.
I believe that the environmental impact of extracting oil from oil shale on the scale required to keep the world running on oil as it is today would have a devastating environmental impact. Probably not as bad as a nuclear war fought over the remaining conventional oil resources...probably.
Re:Giant shale fields... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:At what cost? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dear Canada, (Score:4, Informative)
Re:biotic origin (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Giant shale fields... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fungible (Score:3, Informative)
Re:biotic origin (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nice (Score:1, Informative)
You state that some people will continue to smoke at any price for cigarettes. Try making them cost $100 each. I guarantee you that they will smoke less no matter how addicted they may be now. The same principle applies to oil consumption.
Re:We have more oil? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
"In situ": The oil is "baked" out of the shale (Score:3, Informative)
The center area is also drilled, and the deep rock there is then heated over the course of a year or two. At some point the hydrocarbons literally boil up to the surface and can be recovered (the land is drilled, but not mined). The ice dam keeps the hydrocarbons from contaminating the ground water.
Shell has been working on this for a while, and I believe they have now proven this technology on a test plot or two located on the oil shale lands in western Colorado. At some point the cost of "pumped oil" will rise high enough that this option then becomes competitive on even on a small scale. After that, it should take off as the economies of scale increasingly kick in.
This article suggests it might already be commercially viable (at a price of $30/barrel):
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4051709,00.html [rockymountainnews.com]
The US should be in the catbird seat if it works--I believe the worlds largest deposits of oil shale lie entirely within US borders. We'll benefit the most too by making a general shift over to diesel engines (rather than gasoline engines), because of the nature of those oil shale hydrocarbons, but I don't see that as much of an issue. People are still buying new cars as their old ones wear out.
Re:Bring the boys back home, send em up N (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Arctic Seafloor has huge reserve as well (Score:3, Informative)
And it looks like some ppl may have a way to get at it now.
400 billion barrels to be exact.
http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Discoverer_Enterprise-141.html [deepwater.com]
Re:We have more oil? (Score:4, Informative)
Your link says;
"The top sources of US crude oil imports for January were Canada (1.944 million barrels per day), Saudi Arabia (1.479 million barrels per day), Mexico (1.198 million barrels per day), Nigeria (1.163 million barrels per day), and Venezuela (1.135 million barrels per day)."
The top five in order were;
1) CANADA
2) SAUDI ARABIA
3) MEXICO
4) NIGERIA
5) VENEZUELA
Sure not all of it comes from there, but it's a decent slice.
Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:3, Informative)
And even worse, it takes your RAV4 5 hours to charge. So what you're proposing is that I drive for 1 hour only to stop at a gas station for 5 hours.
And yes, I'm sure newer cars are better at this, but not good enough. That's why purely electric cars don't work.
Slowly phase out coal power plants when exceeded by its solar cousins, but leave enough to take care of night time/bad weather issues.
Your ideas, while perfect in an ideal world, do not work in the real world. Maybe in 30 years we'll have the battery technology to pull of good electric cars. Not right now.
Re:100 Billion Barrels of Greenhouse Gases (Score:5, Informative)
Not a marine biologist, but a marine aquarium owner. Been there, done that.
Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:1, Informative)
I see this all the time, and it's complete rubbish.
During the day, you have a massive energy surplus which you store using a reversable process (by pumping water uphill, or cracking water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, or melting low-melting point cheap substances like salt or whatever). During the night you recover the energy.
Re:We have more oil? (Score:3, Informative)
The Fred Singer's have lost (again), they did manage to delay common sense for ~10yrs but that has also served to strengthen the science. I don't mind paying my kids generation to fix broken infrastucture, I know their super athletic kids living in the attic will point out the mistakes.
I couldn't have said this better myself. (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong type of inflation.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We have more oil? (Score:1, Informative)
Uh, nothing. The Bakken Formation [wikipedia.org] is a well-known petroleum source rock and is probably the source of much of the conventional petroleum found within the Williston Basin [wikipedia.org] of the north-central US and western Canada. Most of the formation is a rather ordinary-looking shale (i.e. clay-rich rock) with a high amount of organic material within it. Although it contains plenty of oil the challenge is in the rock type and extraction from it -- shales are not very permeable. That is, they don't allow fluids to flow through them effectively, and they therefore don't form significant conventional oil deposits. Such deposits are instead usually hosted in sandstone, limestone, or dolomite reservoirs in regions where the oil or gas generated in the source rocks has migrated (i.e. flowed) from the source rock into more porous and permeable rocks where they are easily and cheaply extracted.
If Bakken Formation shales were mined and heated you could retort it like other types of oil shales [wikipedia.org], and there might be in-situ techniques that could be tried, usually at lower recovery rates. But like all oil shales there are huge technical challenges to doing it economically and without significant environmental effects (e.g., contamination of groundwater, expansion of the volume of the shales due to heating, and so on). Estimates of in-place oil (i.e. in the ground) look impressive but are largely irrelevant if there is no practical way to extract it over most of the volume. Some extraction is possible with in-situ fracturing of the host rock and with horizontal drilling techniques, but there are still economic and practical limits to realizing the kind of recovery rates being discussed.
"But the crops! The crops won't grow! [Checks map of world showing land in permafrost] Looks like a net gain to me."
Over the long-term (10 000 years), perhaps. Over the short term (centuries), no. Have you seen what happens to areas of permafrost when they melt? It wouldn't be farmable for generations. Meanwhile, people still have to eat.
Re:6000SUX (Score:2, Informative)
Re:We have more oil? (Score:2, Informative)
So the nuclear power is solely intended for export.
Re:We have more oil? (Score:5, Informative)
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]
Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:2, Informative)
As far as EV goes millions of people have commutes to work which are less than the current capacity of battery power. Throw in the opportunity for their cars to be charging while they are working during the day, and EV become even more viable.
As of right now, it's not that we can't move towards greener energy use. It's that too many people have too much too lose / gain. Depending how you want to see it. Our president is just one of many people who profit from oil.
Only 10% of oil goes to automotive gasoline? (Score:5, Informative)
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
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:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:3, Informative)
They super heat water and then store it and use it latter. Right now these plants(prototypes) can give power up to 6 hours after dark. With refinements to the technology there really isn't a reason to see it move into a 24 hours operation.
Not to poo-poo nuclear energy, I am a fan, but the newer solar technologies are shaping up nicely.
we aren't talking about solar panels here, we are talking about solar collector the aim there energy in to a pip the length of a football field and generate many hundreds of megawatt.
Which can be expanded by just buying land.
Re:Only 10% of oil goes to automotive gasoline? (Score:2, Informative)
- They kill sea turtles [physorg.com] and other wildlife.
- They can spread malaria, and have been banned due to this in Uganda [treehugger.com]
and other African countries.
- They are very unsightly.
- They require people to clean them up.
Several countries have banned [wikipedia.org] the use of plastic bags completly. As usual with anything relating to the environment most of the US trails behind, clinging to outdated views.On a personal note, I was on a road trip through Texas & Mexico recently, and all along the highways and roads there were lots of plastic bags clinging to trees and bushes. Many beautiful desert scenes were completely ruined by them.
Granted, there were more in Mexico, but it didn't look like they pay people to clean up along the side of the road like they do in TX.
Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:2, Informative)
We have vast areas of the country where solar is already viable as an energy source. Albeit pricey but prices are falling. And a massive infusion would bring them down further. Thin film, for example, could potentially reach parity with coal in mass production.
Given the huge difference between day time consumption and night time consumption, reductions in day time consumption are more significant than night time consumption. And will be unless we all became, heh, vampires or something like that.
Further, consider the population of the Southwestern US. While areas such as AZ and NM may be rather small, SoCal is greater in population than many nations on Earth. Even if you were talking about solar for, oh, a third of the US, you're covering a lot of people and, by the way, a lot of air conditioners.
There's another thing to consider.
I lived in LA during those lovely rolling blackouts. One thing I've noticed is that CFLs are much, much cheaper these days than when we in LA were changing out every bulb we could find. That many people buying CFLs en masse may well have boosted CFL production into that tipping point of mass manufacturing where prices start falling.
So the rest of the country benefited from the results of the "early adopters" being literally hundreds of thousands of frantic Angelinos trying to stop the blackouts.
Suppose we subsidize the crap out of a big push to get the Southwest to move to solar as much as possible. Creating a big market for solar would bring prices down. Getting heavily populated areas such as LA "off grid" even just sometimes, even just a few hours a day, reduces the pressure on the national grid. Which could, ironically enough, result in stabilizing prices for the rest of us who can't use solar.
And a big ramp up in solar could result in prices falling to the point where it would be worth installing even in other areas. Say areas where you'd only get, oh, a 25% cut in your bill. Nothing to do cartwheels over but I'd do it if the prices came down enough to make it viable for even just a quarter off my electric bill (which continues to climb... sigh).
Yeah, it's not a cure all. But it has the potential to make a serious and significant impact.
I don't care for nuclear at all but recognize we may have backed ourselves into a corner. Still, the more we can do with other sources, the fewer of those plants we'll need eh?
Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:1, Informative)
Solar thermal plants can store energy over the course of a day to keep running all night, or on cloudy days. Photovoltaics don't work if the sun isn't shining, but they would be used, primarily, to offset power peaks - for example, air conditioners, which run the most when the sun is shining.
Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:3, Informative)
Solar hasn't provided baseload power in the past, but it may soon.
Re:Naive (Score:3, Informative)
So, besides the size of the field, there are these two factors to consider:
1. Rate of extraction
2. Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI)
If it can only be produced at 1 million barrels a day, but the US currently imports 13 million a day, that isn't going to mean much in terms of independence, is it?
Also, since we're talking about shale, the EROEI is probably so low it might take as much as 600k barrels of oil worth of energy to extract each 1 million, leaving 400k net. So to make the US truly independent by matching its current import rate, this field would have to produce at a rate of more than 20 million barrels a day. That's a really high figure considering total worldwide production is around 70-80 million a day. Not bloody likely for this single field.
In short it's very unlikely that it will put even a minor dent in the USA's need to import oil.
Re:We have more oil? (Score:3, Informative)
However, expansion of current plants has pretty much kept pace with demand. Note that the reason that there are few new plants is because there has been a lack of people unwilling to invest in the construction of new plants. There are two reasons for this. First, it's easier to expand then to build new. Second, neither the short-term nor the long-term ROI is there for these kind of major investments. Easily recoverable oil reserves are shrinking, leading to an increase in oil costs, leading to a decrease in the margins on petroleum products. There goes your incentives to build refineries. Note that there is also a decrease in the amount of new oil extraction infrastructure being built, too (rigs, etc.), due to the same reasons.
So, yes, refineries have a small shortfall at the moment - it's not because of the big, bad people not wanting smelly refineries in their back yards - it's because the ROI isn't there.