U.S. Has More Oil Reserves Than Iran and Venezuela
There is a great commentary piece out from CNSNews.com about the amount of oil reserves we potentially have here in America.
This is very interesting:
The U.S. government knows where it can get its hands on more untapped petroleum than exists in the proven reserves of Iran or Iraq, which have 136 billion barrels and 115 billion barrels, respectively.
This unexploited stock of crude is greater than what the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports is in the proven reserves of Russia (60 billion barrels), Libya (41.5 billion barrels) and Nigeria (36.2 billion barrels) combined.
It is more than Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela has (80 billion barrels). It is more than is now known to sit beneath the waters and sands of Kuwait (101.5 billion barrels) or the United Arab Emirates (97.6 billion barrels).
So, where is all this oil? And why aren’t they pumping it?
What cartel is holding it off the market, to drive up prices at American gas stations and American supermarkets? What insidious power is stifling the free market for this vital commodity and thus threatening the vitality of our economy?
It is us, of course. We are the culprits. We are responsible for artificially increasing oil prices. It is our oil that sits untapped beneath our deserts, our forests, our swamps and our oceans. It is our politicians — the ones we freely elected, and re-elected, and re-elected — who are not allowing our oil to be drilled by us and sold to us.
In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, requiring the Department of Interior to inventory the oil resources that could be found both onshore and offshore in U.S. territory. In February 2006, Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) published the report on offshore oil resources on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). It determined there were 85.9 billion barrels of “undiscovered technically recoverable” oil sitting off our beaches.
Just this offshore portion of our undiscovered oil is more than all the proven oil in Venezuela, and more than all the proven oil in Russia, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain combined.
What does the government mean when it says this oil is “undiscovered technically recoverable” oil? It means we can go get it with off-the-shelf technology, but the government makes no judgment about the profitability of doing so. This oil, the government says, is “in undiscovered accumulations analogous to those in existing fields producible with current recovery technology and efficiency, but without any consideration of economic viability.”
Last month, with almost no attention from the liberal media, the Bureau of Land Management released the report estimating the other part of America’s undiscovered oil riches, the onshore resources. This added another 53 billion barrels to the national petroleum pot.
“The nation’s undiscovered oil resources total about 139 Bbbls (billion barrels),” says the report. “Of that total, the MMS estimates that 86 Bbbls are offshore under the OCS, comprising 62 percent of the nation’s resources. State waters and nonfederal onshore resources are the second largest potential source of production (21 percent), followed by Federal onshore oil resources (17 percent).”
We don’t hear about this of course because the liberal media and the radical environmentalists know that it severely weakens their arguments for not exploiting such reserves.
Think about that folks. The radical environmentalists are preventing us from potentially having more oil than Iran and Venezuela. Understand that this would significantly reduce our dependence on the Gulf Arab states for our oil, which just so happens to be a key, I believe, in securing ourselves from terrorism.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
What it means is that there is a strong possibility that there is a significant amount of reserves.
You are technically correct, but you make it seem as though these estimates are pulled out of a hat. They’re not.
We know for a fact that we are not fully exploiting the reserves in the Gulf of Mexico. So we’re not even close to capacity there.
We also we have pretty reliable data with respect to ANWR due to the hypersensitivity of the radical environmentalists.
Who says it take 10 years to usefully extract any located reserves? So what if it did? Does that mean that simply because it might take 10 years to fully realize the supplies that we shouldn’t drill?
The larger issue here–and I want to see if you agree with me on this–is that we must do everything possible to move away from oil being supplied to us by the Arab Gulf States.
Would you at least agree with this? If so, how do you propose we do it?
Ethanol? Yeah look at the price of corn.
Hybrid? Ok, there’s some promise in that, but are we within 10 years of it becoming much more efficient and affordable?
If we can agree on the premise that we need to move away from foreign oil, then I want to know how we can do it.
That’s the issue to me.
The problem with proven reserves in the US is a huge chunk of them are in South Texas where ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and some other major own large old leases that allow for one well to hold the acreage. The SEC allows for an accounting strategy to book “proven reserves” as capital assets. Most of these old leases aren’t getting developed. Exxon owns 600,000 acre lease called the King Ranch that sits there. I live on a 38,000 ranch with huge proven reserves, and ExxonMobil and Chevron do the bare minimum. If a company has “proven reserves” booked as an asset, it makes no sense to develop them because every dollar in sales is actually a loss on the books. Also, many of these wells have been shut in since 1996, and that can make them harder to produce, should the SEC rules ever change.
Undiscovered reserves are simply an estimate of oil that may be available. These are not real reserves or proven reserves. Also, only a fraction of reserves, once discovered, are extractable.
In essence, these reserves you mention are a fantasy. They aren’t available now. They haven’t even been discovered. And even if they are discovered it would take ten years or more to produce them.
What matters most is not ‘Undiscovered Reserves’ but ‘Ultimately Recoverable Reserves.’ For example, the Bakken Shale reserve in the US is thought to hold more than 100 billion barrels of oil. But of that only a small fraction — about 4.3 billion barrels of oil — is currently recoverable.
The figures posted by Iran, Venezuala and others you mention above are their estimates of ‘Ultimately Recoverable Reserves.’ So to make a comparison between recoverable reserves and undiscovered reserves is like comparing the money in your bank account today to the money you hope to have in savings twenty years from now. You can hope for it, you can plan for it, but until you earn it you can’t spend it. In other words — it’s not there yet.
Direct comparison of the two figures is a fallacious at best. Overall, very poor and misleading information used to serve a political agenda.