North Dakota

According to Business Week, the much anticipated USGS report about oil in the Bakken Formation will be released on Thursday.

Julie LeFever, a geologist with the state Geological Survey in Grand Forks, has been studying the Bakken for more than two decades. She calls it an “unconventional resource.”

The oil is trapped in microscopic pores of rock, and to capture it, most companies “fracture stimulate” horizontal wells by forcing pressurized fluid and sand to break pores in the rock and prop them open to recover oil.

“It’s not something you would see in most oil formations,” LeFever said. With technology, she said, “the success rates are going up, but we’re not all the way there yet.”

She said estimates of the total amount of oil in the Bakken Formation have varied wildly over the years, from 10 billion barrels to 500 billion barrels. The higher estimate was done by Leigh Price, a USGS geologist who died in 2000 before his study was published.

We recently discussed this topic on April 3rd, but had not been able to verify when the report was actually going to be released. In our last post, a commenter named Ben broke down what these numbers actually mean.

[Via Business Week]

We’ve written about the Bakken Formation before (most recently, in 2006), but according to various sources (I haven’t seen anything too solid on this, anyone else?) a new report to be released by the USGS within the next month will quantify the amount of oil in the formation beneath Montana and North Dakota.

Caveat: Most of the blogs currently talking about this topic are websites that lean pretty heavily to the right side of the political fence and are proclaiming this is the key to America’s energy independence.

While true in a sense, all of these sites seem to completely overlook the highly negative implications that mining and processing these oil shales will have on both the environment and climate change. The key to energy independence isn’t to find more oil elsewhere, it’s to stop using it.

The Bakken Oil Formation, which covers North Dakota and portions of Montana and South Dakota, is believed to have 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil. The 200,000 square mile reserve that[sic] was initially discovered in 1951.

In 2007, EOG Resources of Texas drilled a single well in Parshal N.D. that is expected to have yielded 700,000 barrels of oil. Marathon Oil is investing $1.5 billion and drilling 300 new wells.

Wow. 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil is an absolutely absurd amount. According to various reports, Saudi Arabia has around 300 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

Update [Oct. 17 2008]: I notice this post in particular has been one of the more visited articles on this website. Here is a link to the report that the USGS released about the Bakken Formation back in April. According to the report, there are only 3 - 4 billion gallons of recoverable oil in the formation, not the 175 to 500 billion that was quoted in the article up above.

A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released April 10, shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency’s 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil.

Technically recoverable oil resources are those producible using currently available technology and industry practices. USGS is the only provider of publicly available estimates of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas resources.

New geologic models applied to the Bakken Formation, advances in drilling and production technologies, and recent oil discoveries have resulted in these substantially larger technically recoverable oil volumes. About 105 million barrels of oil were produced from the Bakken Formation by the end of 2007.

The USGS Bakken study was undertaken as part of a nationwide project assessing domestic petroleum basins using standardized methodology and protocol as required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 2000.

The Bakken Formation estimate is larger than all other current USGS oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest “continuous” oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. A “continuous” oil accumulation means that the oil resource is dispersed throughout a geologic formation rather than existing as discrete, localized occurrences. The next largest “continuous” oil accumulation in the U.S. is in the Austin Chalk of Texas and Louisiana, with an undiscovered estimate of 1.0 billions of barrels of technically recoverable oil.

“It is clear that the Bakken formation contains a significant amount of oil - the question is how much of that oil is recoverable using today’s technology?” said Senator Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota. “To get an answer to this important question, I requested that the U.S. Geological Survey complete this study, which will provide an up-to-date estimate on the amount of technically recoverable oil resources in the Bakken Shale formation.”

The USGS estimate of 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil has a mean value of 3.65 billion barrels. Scientists conducted detailed studies in stratigraphy and structural geology and the modeling of petroleum geochemistry. They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates.

CNN posted an article on a mummified dinosaur found in North Dakota in 2004. The dinosaur, an Edmontosaurus (duck-billed dinosaur), was unearthed in 2004 and originally discovered by Tyler Lyson. Lyson is a 25 year old doctoral paleontology student at Yale University and discovered the specimen on his uncle’s ranch in 1999.

Researchers have used the world’s largest CT scanner, operated by the Boeing Co. in California and used to examine space shuttle parts, to get a better look at what is encased in the rumpled mass of sandstone.

“This is the fourth dinosaur mummy that’s ever been found in the world of any significance,” said Stephen Begin, a Michigan consultant on the project. “It may turn out to be one of the best mummies, because of the quality of the skin that we’re finding and the extent of the skin that’s on the specimen.”

Dakota was moved to the museum early last month and is currently surrounded by precariously perched desk lamps and a machine to suck up dust. State paleontologist John Hoganson, of the North Dakota Geological Survey, said it will take a year, maybe more, to uncover it.

A study carried out in 1999 by Leigh Price, working the the USGS concluded that there is potentially more oil in the Bakken shales formation beneath eastern Montana and North Dakota than the total amount of oil present in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. (400 billion barrels vs. 16 billion barrels in the ANWR)

However, Leigh Price died the following year, before scientists were able to peer review his research, so his claims were never verified.

The USGS now wants to review his work and determine the validity of the research.

If this research is accurate, it has HUGE implications for North Dakota’s economy in terms of federal money for research and exporting oil. North Dakota’s State Oil and Gas Division supports the research but has a “conservative” estimate of up to 200 billion barrels of petroleum beneath the state, still a huge amount.