Largest continuous oil assessment by USGS

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

The U.S. Geological Survey has announced its largest ever assessment of undiscovered, technically recoverable, unconventional oil resources. The agency has estimated that the Wolfcamp shale and Bone Spring formation in the Delaware basin portion of the Permian basin in Texas and New Mexico contain a mean of 46.3 billion barrels of oil, 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 20 billion cubic feet of natural gas liquids.

The Permian basin holds a particularly prolific unconventional oil and gas resource, although production from the basin is currently somewhat constrained by limitations in the pipeline systems used to transport products to marked. A 2016 USGS assessment of the Wolfcamp shale in the Midland basin portion of the Permian basin was the second highest assessment of continuous, unconventional oil at that time.

USGS says that companies are using both traditional vertical wells and horizontal wells involving hydraulic fracturing to develop oil and gas in the region.

“The results we’ve released today demonstrate the impact that improved technologies such as hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling have had on increasing the estimates of undiscovered, technically recoverable continuous (i.e. unconventional) resources,” said Walter Guidroz, program coordinator of the USGS Energy Resources Program, when the new assessment was published.

- ALAN BAILEY