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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: 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.

    --
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    • (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.