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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.
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.
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... 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] Looks like a net gain to me.
Ok, yeah! We have more oil! Can we exploit it faster than we have more people?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We got to finish off the Arab oil first, to reduce their political influence in the world.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA?
Absolutely nothing!
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
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.
The Bakken is just one minimally tapped deposit. There's absolutely no shortage of recoverable oil 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%, 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 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.
But this Rottweiler not only is snarling and frothing at the mouth; it also went to Harvard.
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.
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.
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.
Just callin' it like I see it.
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.
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
I'll buy *that* for a dollar!
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)
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.
Or just bring your own bag(s).
I've done this for just about every grocery trip for the past two or three years (except for maybe once a month or two when I actually want a few bags for household garbage cans).
You don't have to be an ecowarrior to think that the number of bags that we use (and throw away) is ridiculous. Here in Canada it's something like 10 billion a year (!).
But the 'environmental' aspect of it is only part of it. Frankly, I stopped taking bags from the grocery store mostly just because I was sick of having so many of the damn things that I would never use. But once I started, I realized just how more convenient it is to have a larger sturdy bag (or bags, usually) that I can throw over my shoulder instead of a dozen or so flimsy plastic ones that are uncomfortable to carry.
Even when I'm doing a larger shopping run with a car (about half the time over the winter) it's still a hell of a lot easier to carry two big blue ikea bags to the kitchen.
Over these past 3 years I've noticed a huge shift in attitudes about the whole thing. It used to be that I'd have to practically shove the grocery bagboy out of the way and get into a discussion about why I didn't want their bags. Now it seems like at least a third of people bring their own bags, and most stores give a 5 cent discount for it (yay. 5 cents).
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.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
http://www.mhall119.com
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.
I wasn't as surprised by the "save a tree" comment by the lady behind the counter as I was with the conversation I had with a 6 year old (rather ghetto looking) while I stood in line. Went something like this:
6yr old: True or False!...Boys wear panties or boxers?
Me:.....Um false.
6yr old: Wrong! My brother wears panties because he says boxers are too manly.
I'm usually pretty quick but I couldn't think of anything to say to that. That was a very interesting day at Wal-mart.