|
Plenty of Alaska oil and gas yet to find Assessments of undiscovered resources in state lands and in the federal offshore show the potential for further discoveries Alan Bailey Petroleum News
While the annual reports published by Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas primarily present overviews of division activities and summaries of oil and gas production in the state, the report for 2013 that the division has recently published also takes a speculative glance at the future by publishing the results of all of the most recent assessments of undiscovered oil and gas, onshore and offshore the state.
The total comes to a whopping 43 billion barrels of oil and 255 trillion cubic feet of gas. But these volumes represent undiscovered resources that might be technically recovered, without any consideration of the economic feasibility of bringing the resources to market — the report emphasizes that, because of economic constraints, it is unlikely that all of these volumes will ever be produced.
The estimates come from resource assessments conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey onshore and for state waters, and by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on the outer continental shelf.
Arctic resources The bulk of the resources are thought to lie in Arctic Alaska, with possibly 15 billion barrels of undiscovered oil under the North Slope and state waters of the Beaufort Sea. The corresponding figure for gas is 98 trillion cubic feet. On the outer continental shelves of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas there may be 23 billion barrels of oil and 108 trillion cubic feet of gas. These numbers appear to relate to resources thought to lie in conventional hydrocarbon reservoirs and do not include possible shale oil and gas resources.
In southern Alaska, a region where the Cook Inlet basin predominates the oil and gas estimates, there may be more than 3 billion barrels of undiscovered oil and 42 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered gas, including potential coalbed methane resources in the Cook Inlet region. And in Interior Alaska, in regions such as the Yukon Flats basin, there may be several hundred million barrels of oil and more than 5 trillion cubic feet of gas.
In evaluating these assessment figures it is important to realize that the figures are estimates, made through rigorous scientific evaluation but subject to assumptions, some of which may be incorrect. The numbers are mean estimates, near the midpoints of a series of wide ranges of possible values. And, given the high levels of uncertainty, the assessment numbers are perhaps best viewed as broad indications of the overall oil and gas prospectivity of different regions, rather than as definitive resource volumes.
| 