USGS report offers overview of northern Alaska oil and natural gas

Dave Houseknecht and Ken Bird of the U.S. Geological Survey have published a concise and informative overview of current knowledge of the petroleum geology and petroleum resources of northern Alaska. Entitled “Oil and Gas Resources of the Arctic Alaska Petroleum Province,” the report brings together a wealth of information from numerous sources, including published research on the petroleum geology and the most recent petroleum resource estimates published by USGS and the U.S. Minerals Management Service.

“The Arctic Alaska Petroleum Province, encompassing all the lands and adjacent continental shelf areas north of the Brooks Range-Herald arch, is one of the most petroleum-productive areas in the United States, having produced about 15 billion barrels of oil,” the report says.

An overview of the regional geology includes a summary of the various petroleum source and reservoir rocks associated with the known developed and undeveloped oil and gas accumulations of the region. And that petroleum geology overview leads to descriptions of the known oil and gas fields in northern Alaska, together with data about cumulative production to date and estimated remaining reserves for fields along the coast and centered at Prudhoe Bay.

“These accumulations are estimated to hold remaining reserves of nearly 7 billion barrels of oil and more than 35 trillion cubic feet of gas, including resources in undeveloped accumulations that are not typically reported as ‘proven reserves,’” the report says.

Adding resource estimates for other known but undeveloped petroleum accumulations leads to estimates of 23 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 52 trillion cubic feet of natural gas for the entire province.

The report then looks at estimates for undiscovered oil and gas for the various parts of the province: the central North Slope, the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, the Chukchi Shelf, the Beaufort Shelf and the Hope basin. The mean estimates for these regions total technically recoverable, undiscovered volumes of 50 billion barrels of oil and 227 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (the report did not consider unconventional petroleum resources such as basin-centered gas, gas hydrates and coalbed methane).

The report can be downloaded from:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1732/pp1732a/pp1732a.pdf.

—Alan Bailey