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posted by cmn32480 on Monday November 21 2016, @02:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the bblack-gold dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday November 21 2016, @04:06PM

    by inertnet (4071) on Monday November 21 2016, @04:06PM (#430581) Journal

    As an observer I'm not interested in passionate back and forth between pro and contra global warming sides. But I would like to know how many ppm global CO2 levels will rise if we burn all of this oil. I'm sure someone will be able to figure this out.

    Apart from that, there is evidence that mining can lead to earthquakes, especially shale mining. If someone is going to make trillions off this oil field, make sure that some of this money will be used to compensated for damages that result from mining.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Monday November 21 2016, @04:56PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 21 2016, @04:56PM (#430643) Journal
    Starting with 20 billion barrels of oil and assuming it all gets converted to CO2 at 0.43 tonnes [epa.gov] of CO2 per barrel, that's 8.6 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted. 1 ppm CO2 is roughly 7.8 billion tonnes [skepticalscience.com] of CO2. So we're looking at a bit over 1 ppm increase in CO2.

    Current CO2 concentration is 400 ppm roughly (meaning we have a 0.3% increase in CO2 concentration, if it is all burned right now) and temperature sensitivity is proportional to the log change. The estimated sensitivity is 1.5 C to 4.5 C long term increase in global average temperature per doubling of CO2. A 0.3% increase in CO2 concentration would then be 0.4% of a doubling of CO2. That means 0.006 C to 0.02 C increase in long term temperature.

    I personally favor 2 C increase per doubling of CO2. That would be a bit less than 0.01 C increase in long term temperature.

    It'll be a bit less than that in practice because CO2 levels will rise significantly before it is all used up (reducing the ratio of increase) and some will be fixed as asphalt or plastics.
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 21 2016, @11:51PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday November 21 2016, @11:51PM (#430935)

      Several decades ago, I was driving two friends down a dark country road when we came to an essentially blind intersection. I had a fair idea of what "should" be on the other side of the intersection based on the general pattern of the roads in the area, but I didn't actually know for a fact what lay on the other side of the hump in the darkness. Since I was still immortal at the time, I continued motoring on at 60mph, took a light bounce over the hill into the darkness and we continued to cruise on through the night to our destination. My friends were visibly shaken, but, being in their early 20s, shook it off momentarily and nobody expressed a second thought about it.

      Fact of the matter is: I did not know, for a fact, what I was flying us into, could not have stopped or maneuvered in time to avoid maiming or death if the other side of the intersection had been something nasty like a jog in the road, or even a cow standing there. Just because I got us through that little assumption unharmed does not mean it was a good idea - slowing down to a safe maneuvering speed for the blind hill would have been the smart thing to do, and if I took 100 blind hills like that, sooner or later I would have hit something - come to think of it, I did lightly rear-end some stopped cars on the other side of a blind hill around that time, quite lucky they weren't stopped closer or I could have hit them hard enough to hurt someone.

      No matter who you believe, or don't, regarding CO2 and climate change, I know this: it's a blind hill - we haven't done this before, and we don't know what's on the other side. All the best predictions and science can miss something bigger and more significant than the Clathrate gun. What is not a distortion or extrapolation or a guess is that the CO2 levels are higher than they have been in a very long time: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-last-time-co2-was-this-high-humans-didnt-exist-15938 [climatecentral.org] any predictions regarding what this means for the actual future of the climate are ill-informed guesses, at best.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 22 2016, @07:59AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 22 2016, @07:59AM (#431119) Journal
        The obvious rebuttal is why should we do that? By definition, you don't know enough about a "blind hill" to know whether it is important to avoid or not. Usually, you don't even know it is there. I'll just note here that even if we consider anthropogenic global warming to be a blind hill, so would causing ourselves severe economic duress in order to avoid that. Two blind hills and you can't avoid both of them unless we get a serious cost decline in renewable energy production.

        We need to make decisions based on evidence not on fear. Seven billion people depend on that, not just you. The climate change people had their chance and they just didn't have the evidence to justify leaving 20 billion barrels of oil in the ground.
        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:25PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:25PM (#431193)

          A billion years of evolution brought us to this point, mostly moving slowly. Today we're moving much faster... continuing to accelerate at all the blind hills will eventually result in a nasty surprise on the other side.

          The best evidence shows a handful of major extinction events over the last billion years, we've barely had steam power for 200 years and we're well on our way to creating another one. Slowing down and sticking with the behaviors that worked out for the best in the past 10,000 years will yield better long term outcomes than the current quarterly quest for profits.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:15PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:15PM (#431340) Journal

            A billion years of evolution brought us to this point, mostly moving slowly. Today we're moving much faster... continuing to accelerate at all the blind hills will eventually result in a nasty surprise on the other side.

            So what? You don't know where the blind spots are by definition. Which blind spots should we flinch at and which ones should we blissfully zoom through? The obvious thing we should be doing here is exploring these blind spots so they aren't blind spots. I think that's already been done with global warming.

            The obvious thing here is that we're in an arms race of sorts. And while there are some dangerous spots, there's also the fact that we're elevating the entire human race out of poverty thing going on here (which let me note, has very positive long term effects on any sort of climate change, not just global warming).

            Attempting to hold back the world because blind spots, will reward those who ignore you and punish those who pay attention to you. It's a losing position.