Interesting bit of oil news – from Bloomberg:
Billionaire oilman Harold Hamm told North Dakota bankers on Thursday that government estimates of recoverable oil in the Bakken and Three Forks formations are too conservative.
Hamm, 64, chairman and chief executive officer of Continental Resources Inc., said the formations in North Dakota and Montana hold about 20 billion barrels of recoverable crude, or about five times the amount previously estimated by federal geologists. The formations also hold the natural gas equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil, he said…
I decided to check just how big 20 billion barrels are in relation to how much oil we already know is there – according to this Wikipedia article, the US has about 21 billion barrels of proven reserves. If Hamm is right and Bakken holds 20 billion barrels, then that would add about 16 billion barrels to our proven reserves (current USGS estimates are for a bit more than 4 billion barrels in Bakken).
Its not like North Dakota was just discovered last week. Its not like the United States just got in to the oil business (in fact, we were the first country to get in to it). If we can find an extra 16 billion barrels just lying around our back yard, then are there really any limits to the amount of oil we can extract from the world? Meaning – is there any practical limit which would cause us to run out prior to a switch-over to a non-oil energy economy?
Furthermore, if this amount of oil can be found within the continental United States at this late a date, how much could possibly be found within the total United States, including offshore? Perhaps enough to make us independent of foreign oil? Or, at least enough to greatly cut down the amount of oil we import? I think so. We consume about 21 million barrels a day and produce about 8 million barrels a day – if we can increase that amount by 5 million barrels a day, we can stop importing any oil from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela…and that, in and of itself, is a worthwhile thing to do (yes, I know that oil is fungible and we really can’t stop Saudi and Venezuelan oil from winding up in the US as long as we import…but the basic idea is still the same; lower our import requirements).
Drill, baby, drill…lets see just how much oil we really have, and how much we can produce per day, and for how long…and that would also tell us how much time we have before we need to switch over.
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