Question: Does North America have enough oil for the next 600+ years?

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Permalink Reply by Lee Kershner on September 2, 2010 at 10:39am

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2008/3021/pdf/fs08-3021_508.pdf
USGS Assessment of Undiscovered Oil Reserves - 2008
warns about "significant geologic uncertainty in the range of estimates."

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0426/outfront-oil-gas-obama-drill...
America's Untapped Oil and Gas Reserves

Second only to the electric utilities, oil and gas industry the largest lobbying group:
http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E01

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Permalink Reply by Lee Kershner on September 2, 2010 at 11:04am

Here's something interesting: the usgs website I gave you didn't work so I tried to find a better address. In doing so, I came across a 2010 study NATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF OIL AND GAS PROJECT - Oil shale and mahcolite resources of the Piceance Basin, Colorado. It's unavailable for sale and I couldn't find it online.

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Permalink Reply by Lee Kershner on September 2, 2010 at 11:13am

From good old trusty Wikipedia:

Oil shale

The Piceance Basin contains one of the thickest and richest oil shale deposits in the world and is the focus of most on-going oil shale research and development extraction projects in the U.S. The Piceance Basin has an estimated 1.525 trillion barrels of in-place oil shale resources. This study also found an estimated 43.3 billion tons of in-place nahcolite resources in the Piceance Basin. This mineral is embedded with oil shale in many areas. Oil resources can only be obtained from oil shale rock when heated to great temperatures, 530 to 930 degrees Fahrenheit. These temperatures are required because oil shale does not contain crude oil but instead contains kerogen, which is an organic precursor to oil that must be heated for oil production.
Development of oil shale has significant technological and environmental challenges and no economic extraction method is currently available in the U.S. Therefore it is unknown how much of the assessed in-place (total amount present) resource is recoverable.
Increasing demand for energy resources has spurred interest in energy alternatives such as oil shale. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has researched the geology of oil shale, especially the extensive Green River deposits of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. The USGS is making oil shale information accessible via the Internet. Planned products include digital-format shale-oil analyses, stratigraphic and lithologic information, geophysical logs, bibliographic references, and geologic maps of oil shale lands in the western United States.
The USGS is updating its assessments of oil shale resources in support of recommendations in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The USGS is also conducting oil shale assessments in the Uinta Basin of eastern Utah and the Greater Green River Basin of southwest Wyoming. USGS oil shale research activities include:
Utah Geological Survey Collaboration.
Archive and update critical oil shale information.
Development of an oil shale clearinghouse of available USGS reports, papers, and databases.
Monitoring of geologic, technologic, and environmental developments related to unconventional fossil fuel energy sources.
USGS Core Research Center maintenance of core and sample collections.
Collaboration with industry and government in fossil-fuel research.
On 2 April 2009 The U.S. Geological Survey updated its assessment of in-place oil shale resources in the Piceance Basin in western Colorado. This new assessment is about 50 percent larger than the 1989 assessment of about one trillion barrels. Almost all of this increase is due to assessments of new geographic areas and subsurface zones that had too little data for previous research and assessments. "For the first time in 20 years, we have an updated assessment of in-place oil shale in the Piceance Basin of Colorado," said US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. "The USGS scientific report shows significant quantities of oil locked up in the shale rocks of the Piceance Basin. I believe it demonstrates the need for our continued research and development efforts."

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Permalink Reply by Allen Cogbill on September 6, 2010 at 6:30pm

North America does indeed have huge petroleum reserves. In the continental U.S., the major known oil reserves are in oil shale, located mostly in Colorado and Wyoming, and the Bakken Formation, a formation whose reserves are estimated at somewhere between 200-400 BBls (BBll = 1 billion barrels; a barrel is 44 U.S. gallons). Estimates of the amount of oil in the the Bakken Formation vary substantially. In 2006, Leigh Price, a geochemist who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, wrote a USGS open-file report that estimated the Bakken to have upwards of 400 BBl. Price died before the report was published, and USGS has never gotten around to publishing the report for some reason. A scanned version was produced by the North Dakota Geological Survey; it can be downloaded from links at this site (note: the total length of the report, with figures, is about 50 Mb!).

In 2006 the North Dakota Geological Survey produced a short paper summarizing the situation with estimates of the Bakken Formation oil reserves. Their summary:

• The Bakken Formation is a large unconventional resource that underlies most of the western portion of the state of North Dakota.
• Shales that comprise the upper and lower members of the Bakken are world class source rocks.
• An extensive oil sampling program by the North Dakota Geological Survey shows that the Bakken generated oil remains in the Bakken.
• The geological model presented by Price in his paper appears solid and is built upon considerable input by North Dakota Geological Survey geologists, samples from the ND Core and Sample Library, and the well files from the Oil and Gas Division.
• A sophisticated computer program with extensive data input supplied by the ND Geological Survey and Oil and Gas Division places the Bakken generated value at 200 – 300 BBbls.
• How much of the generated oil is recoverable remains to be determined. Estimates of 50%, 18%, and 3 to 10% have been published.
• The Bakken play on the North Dakota side of the basin is still early in the learning curve.
• Technology and the price of oil will dictate what is potentially recoverable from this formation.

The Bakken Formation has been known for some time to contain lots of high-quality oil, comparable to what some term Saudi sweet crude. The formation is located in the Williston Basin, a geologic basin which underlies parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Manitoba, and Sasketchewan. Although the amount of reserves in oil shale probably exceeds the amount available from the Bakken, one of the major advantages of the Bakken Formation is that, at least in the U.S., it largely underlies private land, whereas much of the oil shale is located on land owned by the Federal government. It is much easier for energy development to occur on private land than on land owned by the Feds.

If you're inclined, there is a great deal of information available at the North Dakota Geological Survey website.

Development of the oil shale will likely be impeded by the fact that the Feds own the land (and the mineral rights). A similar situation exists for off-shore petroleum deposits.

All this means that the U. S. has quite a bit of oil. However, we're using it at a prodigious rate. While it is currently difficult for other sources to compete with its price, at some point it will likely be cheaper to make fuels from coal. Of course, that resource will also be eventually used up, and we'll probably start using carbon-based fuels that are derived, perhaps, from plants. Barring a major revolution in energy production, we'll be using carbon-based fuels for some time, as their energy density is simply too high to be replaced by other sources. Of course, there could be a revolution in energy production: after all, in the early 1900s, how many predicted the use of nuclear power?

Robert Laughlin, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, recently wrote an article entitled What the Earth Knows about the future of energy development. I recommend it, as he takes the long view of the issue. For those worried about the "future of the planet", let me say that the planet will carry on just fine, thank you. Humans, on the other hand, may have some problems.

For those inclined to listen to broadcasts or podcasts, Russ Roberts produced a very interesting interview of Laughlin. Roberts, by the way, is one of the producers of the Hayek v. Keynes rap video, which at this point has over 1.4 million views on YouTube.

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Permalink Reply by Lee Kershner on September 7, 2010 at 9:26am

Allen, you are an incomparable addition to this website. If only more professors would take part in public blogs.

Your reference to Robert B. Laughlin's (Nobel Professor Physics, Stanford) article excerpted from his new (not yet published) book is by far the most lucid account of the unruly earth's geologic history that a non-geologist can read. Learning that the "sea level has not moved up and down over the course of geologic time an amount greater the mountains are tall" and that the amount of water on earth has not changed significantly over geologic time is highly significant as well as the fact that the past nine glacial periods were caused by the "waxing and waning of the polar ice sheets."

A challenging paragraph: Nonetheless, damaging the earth is precisely what’s concerning a lot of responsible people at the moment. Carbon dioxide from the human burning of fossil fuel is building up in the atmosphere at a frightening pace, enough to double the present concentration in a century. This buildup has the potential to raise average temperatures on the earth several degrees centigrade, enough to modify the weather and accelerate melting of the polar ice sheets. Governments around the world have become so alarmed at this prospect that they’ve taken significant, although ineffective, steps to slow the warming. These actions include legislating carbon caps, funding carbon sequestration research, subsidizing alternate energy technologies, and initiating at least one serious international treaty process to balance the necessary economic sacrifices across borders.

Unfortunately, this concern isn’t reciprocated. On the scales of time relevant to itself, the earth doesn’t care about any of these governments or their legislation. It doesn’t care whether you turn off your air conditioner, refrigerator, and television set. It doesn’t notice when you turn down your thermostat and drive a hybrid car. These actions simply spread the pain over a few centuries, the bat of an eyelash as far as the earth is concerned, and leave the end result exactly the same: all the fossil fuel that used to be in the ground is now in the air, and none is left to burn. The earth plans to dissolve the bulk of this carbon dioxide into its oceans in about a millennium, leaving the concentration in the atmosphere slightly higher than today’s. Over tens of millennia after that, or perhaps hundreds, it will then slowly transfer the excess carbon dioxide into its rocks, eventually returning levels in the sea and air to what they were before humans arrived on the scene. The process will take an eternity from the human perspective, but it will be only a brief instant of geologic time."

Thank you for the links to data regarding the Bakken Formation in the U.S. and Canada. Is it possible to construe North America as the next Saudi Arabia of the world -- ownership of greatest oil reserves?

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