My bubble was pretty thoroughly burst by the U. S. Geological Survey report on the study of the Bakken oil fields.
The USGS study has been released and estimates that about 3.5 Billion barrels of oil may be recoverable in the Bakken Formation.
That's a long way from the 200 Billion barrels that some optimists had predicted. It is about half what this country burns in any one year- hardly another Gwahar.
We can hope that more discoveries are made, and estimates revised upwards. The 3.5 billion figure is much larger than the 600 million barrels once thought to be the topside for these fields.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, the "Sugar Loaf" fields are thought by Petrobas to contain as much as 33 Billion barrels, of which 10% to 15% is recoverabe, which means, at most, another 4.5 billion barrels by the most optimistic projections.
The United States alone tears through 7.3 billion barrels a year, so do the arithmetic.
As I stated previously, even were the Bakken the size and magnitude of Gwahar, it would not change the fact of peak oil and its implications for our industrial societies, for at our current rates of consumption, U.S. consumption alone would deplete the fields in less than 35 years, even if there were no competition for supplies.
Time to stop daydreaming and confront the stark truth of the situation.
2 comments:
What is your prediction on the 2009 price of a barrel of crude. You picked well above $100 mid-year 2008 on Jan 01,08. I have to say that was pretty damn on the money.
The amount of oil consumption just seems to rise every year as the amount of oil reserves slowly deplete. This is definitely an alarming issue which needs to be resolved as soon as possible.
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