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The Wolfcamp shale in the Midland Basin portion of Texas' Permian Basin province contains an estimated mean of 20 billion barrels of oil, 16 trillion cubic feet of associated natural gas, and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey. This estimate is for continuous (unconventional) oil, and consists of undiscovered, technically recoverable resources.
The estimate of continuous oil in the Midland Basin Wolfcamp shale assessment is nearly three times larger than that of the 2013 USGS Bakken-Three Forks resource assessment, making this the largest estimated continuous oil accumulation that USGS has assessed in the United States to date.
"The fact that this is the largest assessment of continuous oil we have ever done just goes to show that, even in areas that have produced billions of barrels of oil, there is still the potential to find billions more," said Walter Guidroz, program coordinator for the USGS Energy Resources Program. "Changes in technology and industry practices can have significant effects on what resources are technically recoverable, and that's why we continue to perform resource assessments throughout the United States and the world."
https://www.usgs.gov/news/usgs-estimates-20-billion-barrels-oil-texas-wolfcamp-shale-formation
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 21 2016, @03:51PM
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday November 21 2016, @05:13PM
In some sense, hydraulic fracturing is intended to cause earthquakes, albeit very small, in that the intent is to fracture the rock. These intentionally produced earthquakes, often termed microseismic events, are typically on the order of −3.0 ≤ M ≤ 0 [...] Since 2011, a number of other earthquake sequences with felt earthquakes induced by hydraulic fracturing have been reported (Green et al., 2012; Holland, 2013; Friberg et al., 2014; Skoumal et al., 2015). The largest hydraulic fracturing-induced earthquakes to date are two ML 4.4 earthquakes in central west Alberta and northeast British Columbia (BC Oil and Gas Commission, 2014). In these cases, the total injected volumes were remarkably high for hydraulic fracturing (e.g., 630,000 barrels or100,000 m3 for both ML 4.4 earthquakes; H. Kao, personal comm., 2015).
-- https://profile.usgs.gov/myscience/upload_folder/ci2015Jun1012005755600Induced_EQs_Review.pdf [usgs.gov]
Fact 1: Fracking is NOT causing most of the induced earthquakes. Wastewater disposal is the primary cause of the recent increase in earthquakes in the central United States.
-- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/induced/myths.php [usgs.gov]
Note the words "most" and "primary."
In many locations, wastewater has little or nothing to do with hydraulic fracturing. In Oklahoma, less than 10% of the water injected into wastewater disposal wells is used hydraulic fracturing fluid. Most of the wastewater in Oklahoma is saltwater that comes up along with oil during the extraction process.
In contrast, the fluid disposed of near earthquake sequences that occurred in Youngstown, Ohio, and Guy, Arkansas, consisted largely of spent hydraulic fracturing fluid.
-- ibid.
So they're saying that hydrofracturing (fracking) isn't always the primary source of waste water, but sometimes it is.