The Bakken Play in the Williston Basin in the Dakotas and Eastern Montana has just been assessed at 4.3 billion bbls. of proven recoverable reserves, the largest recent crude oil play in the continental USA.
This new find & assessment will once again highlight the fact that American political efforts to restrict development of fields offshore & in ANWR is frankly frivolous & stupid. There is a Luddite agenda out there among the ultra-left Democrats & their anti-industrial & anti-internal combustion engine tree huggers.
Also, the NIMBY syndrome for refining operations has prevented new refining capacity & thereby increased the likelihood of bottlenecks & breakdowns in processing crude.
Finally, obsessive regulation by Congress hikes prices by imposing mandates on processing procedures and redundant safety precautions. Spurred by environmental busybodies, the proliferation of various grades of refined product mandated by state & other official agencies is pricing oil to a level that causes a massive economic impact.
The enemies of "big oil" are hurting the economy & stifling US industrial capacity and economic development.
I believe the ultimate target is the family car and the mobility of the nuclear American family in general---the politicians on the left believe they can turn an immense continental economy into a Euro-style mass transit economy based on rail & public transportation. The only previous continental economy where this has been attempted was the USSR. With disastrous consequences.
The entire "greening" project in its various Luddite manifestations is a recipe for economic disaster.
...on the part of the USGS and the North Dakota Geological Survey, plus some willing accomplices in private industry.
Note that no where in their press release do they tout "proved recoverable reserves". In fact, I think the nomenclature was something like "undiscovered technically recoverable resources". It might seem to a lay audience like I'm splitting hairs with you, but these words have a specific, precise engineering meaning.
Undiscovered means they're anything but "proved" -- they haven't yet been drilled & delineated. "Technically recoverable" implies without regard to economics.
The stuff I've read says the formation has a porosity of 5% -- very low indeed -- and permeability of 0.04 millidarcies, which would make it very tight for a gas sand, much less oil.
The Bakken Formation would be considered "source rock" in most producing basins, not a commercial quality reservoir. It depends on natural fractures, horizontal drilling and/or hydraulic fracturing to be economic.
The Bakken sounds a lot like the Austin Chalk play of Texas/Louisiana. The Chalk has been a nice play for a few operators that chose to climb the learning curve (and a bone yard for some others). I'll go out on a limb and predict that neither will be the panacea for our energy woes.