Federal Government Finds 7 Years’ Worth of Fuel
The Interior Department found a substantial basin of oil and natural gas in Texas and New Mexico.
Dec 11, 2018
WASHINGTON, D.C. – As the United States becomes a net oil exporter for the first time in 75 years, the US Department of the Interior has announced the discovery of the largest continuous oil and gas field ever found—nearly 46.2 billion barrels of oil and 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in southern New Mexico and northern Texas. To put that in perspective, the U.S. consumes about seven billion barrels of oil a year.
"Christmas came a few weeks early this year," said Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in announcing the discovery, which his department described as the “largest continuous oil and gas resource potential ever assessed.”
According to the Washington Examiner, the Interior said that new technologies have helped predict the “undiscovered, technically recoverable resources” in the Wolfcamp Shale and overlying Bone Spring Formation in the Delaware Basin portion of Texas and New Mexico’s Permian Basin.
Resources are large areas where oil and gas are known to be, but it hasn't been determined if its economically practical to recover them yet. As new surveying, drilling and recovery technologies are developed, resources can rapidly shift to become proven reserves, similar to wells that were once "dry" when they were three-quarters full now being productive again.
This is effectively how the new giant oil and gas field was found, says New Atlas. According to the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Geological Survey had already made assessments of the Permian Basin province, though the Wolfcamp shale and Bone Spring Formation weren't originally included. The area is already highly productive in oil and gas, but it was only with the introduction of new technology and studying their effects on output that the size and wealth of the resource could be assessed. How economical it will be to recover the oil and gas there has yet to be determined.
