[dukey]

it is amazing how many americans believe in abiotic oil

[AirlinePilot]

Its amazing how many Americans think the Bakken will garner us our energy independence for hundreds of Years!!!!

[SeaGypsy]

Or that 'there are thousands of capped wells just waitin' for them to turn open the spigots'

[TheAntiDoomer]

http://seekingalpha.com/article/256403- ... -investors
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')Then I came across this report from a USGS employee; this paper was never released by the USGS, because Leigh Price passed away before it could be finalized. Leigh Price's paper is, in my opinion, the definitive study on the amount of oil in the Bakken shale formation. He estimated that there was 400 to 500 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken. There is a summary of the various Bakken estimates of oil in place (.pdf) on the North Dakota state website. If you figure the industry could produce 4% to 6% of this oil that is in place, this would put the producible oil at 16 billion to 30 billion barrels of oil just in the Bakken.

Therefore, after going through all this data and assigning estimated barrels of oil to various basins and shale oil plays plus including an estimate of yet to be discovered shale oil, I came to an estimate of oil in place. This estimate was also influenced by Leigh Price's paper on the Bakken. My estimate of oil in place in the continental US is from about 3 trillion to 5 trillion barrels of oil not including the 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. See this shale play website for a partial list of Shale oil plays and basins in the US. I know this seems very high, but it was only a few short years ago that we were going to need to import huge amounts of liquefied natural gas to meet our demand for natural gas, and now we have a glut of natural gas in the market place because of all the shale natural gas.

We should be able to produce at least 150 billion barrels of oil to maybe 1.0 trillion barrels of oil if the majority of these plays can be water flooded and CO2 injected as in the Canadian Bakken. I used 5% for the low estimate of 3 trillion barrels and 20% of the high estimate 5 trillion barrels figuring they could do some water flood and CO2 tertiary treatment to a large part of this land. For this oil to be recovered, it will require that the oil price stays above $70 a barrel so the economics are in place to fully develop these areas. We need to have some university professors in geology do some research instead of a retired, former CPA on this matter, because it becomes very important for the nation to determine what is a good projection of possible oil production.

[Keith_McClary]

Origins and characteristics of the basin-centered continuous-reservoir
unconventional oil-resource base of the Bakken Source System, Williston Basin
Manuscript by Leigh C. Price (1999/2000)

[Armageddon]

EROEI ? Flow Rates ? Details, shmetails.

[ian807]

Well golly, it's interesting that the oil companies aren't all over this, what with the price of oil being high and relations with the OPEC world low.

Could it be that ... of this umpty-trillions of barrels of "oil" that only a tiny, tiny fraction will ever be either economically or energetically profitable? Could it be that a teacup of oil in a cubic yard of shale 1 mile down just isn't ever going to do much for humankind?

I think the idea that the author's suggestion that this needs to be examined by a geologist is probably a good one.

[Beery1]

You can have an infinite amount of oil in the ground and it still won't save the US because what's important is not how much oil you have, but whether you can make a profit and how fast you can extract it - and even if it's profitable, we cannot extract it anywhere near fast enough to supply what we need.

[babystrangeloop]

Who cares how much oil there is in the ground? There's always oil and that's all you need to know.

[SilentRunning]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TheAntiDoomer', '&')quot;The human ability to innovate out of a jam is profound.That’s why Darwin will always be right, and Malthus will always be wrong.” -K.R. Sridhar

[SilentRunning]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TheAntiDoomer', 'h')ttp://seekingalpha.com/article/256403-how-much-oil-does-the-u-s-have-in-the-ground-what-does-it-mean-for-investors
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')Then I came across this report from a USGS employee; this paper was never released by the USGS, because Leigh Price passed away before it could be finalized. Leigh Price's paper is, in my opinion, the definitive study on the amount of oil in the Bakken shale formation. He estimated that there was 400 to 500 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken. There is a summary of the various Bakken estimates of oil in place (.pdf) on the North Dakota state website. If you figure the industry could produce 4% to 6% of this oil that is in place, this would put the producible oil at 16 billion to 30 billion barrels of oil just in the Bakken.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'i')t depends on how one defines oil. It used to be the stuff that flowed as a liquid out the well, mostly under reservoir pressure (primary drive is water or NG). Now the international rating agencies have begun to include all sorts of other stuff in the mix. Ethanol corn liquor. Tar sludge. My recent favorite is several million barrels per day of NGL (upon which IEA is betting all its reputation upon) that includes butane, propane, and other alkanes. Not even remotely petroleum. Something about substitution. Butane is for lighters. things have gotten ridiculous on the downslope of the oil age.

[SeaGypsy]

Propane is the main alternative fuel for transport in Australia, sold as LPG for about 2/3rds the price of unleaded, about 4/5ths as efficient.
Also LPG/ diesel blends are proving very efficient in heavy transport.
Both run with fuel side only (manifold sleeve injector & control) modifications on standard petrol or diesel engines.

[rockdoc123]

indeed the liquids that come out of gas are quite valuable for numerous reasons. Of course propane is used in many places as heating fuel and can be used to power vehicles (it is clean running and results in greater engine life). Ethane is used almost exclusively in the petrochemical industry, predominantly to produce ethylene. Butane's value is in it's use as a blending component for gasoline. Pentanes and/or Pentanes plus are very valuable in Alberta these days as they can be used as transport diluent for heavy oil.
The importance here is not that most of these liquids can be used as replacements for gasoline but rather that they can be utilized for other reasons where oil and its derivatives might have been used previously thus making more oil available for fuel useage.

[vaseline2008]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Beery1', 'Y')ou can have an infinite amount of oil in the ground and it still won't save the US because what's important is not how much oil you have, but whether you can make a profit and how fast you can extract it - and even if it's profitable, we cannot extract it anywhere near fast enough to supply what we need.

[seahorse3]

I hope these estimates are right, but I have my doubts. I also don't know at what cost we suffer environmentally to get this oil out. For example, I've never been for cutting down the redwoods to use for lumber. Some places of the world should be preserved for all future humanity. I don't want our world to become an unregulated "China Syndrome" where we the world we live in is destroyed for GDP. I believe we can have both.

If technology and innovation can keep us going, I would like to see the innovation come where we can have plentiful energy, enough for all, and have a clean world for everyone to enjoy. I wish that someone would be able to follow up on Tesla's ideas, that enough free electricity could be harnessed for everyone's use. Maybe he was a quack, I don't know, but maybe he was onto something.

[ian807]

We might extend powerdown time by decades if we moved most private cars to alternatives to petroleum like butane or straight natural gas, for that matter.

Successful capitalism, of course, means never having to think about tomorrow.

[rockdoc123]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')o deliver natural gas to a filling station one must compress it at a cost in energy. There's goes all the energy and profit up in the air in CO2.