Rex Trulove
When people think of countries with a lot of oil reserves, they often think of Arabia and the Middle Eastern countries, Russia, and Venezuela. Only a small percentage of people think about the United States in terms of the amount of oil that is produced and the volume in in-the-ground reserves. The truth is amazing and staggering.
For decades, the US has been pumping huge amounts of oil out of the ground. In fact, millions of barrels of oil are pumped every single day in the US. For reference, a barrel of oil holds 42 gallons. That’s a lot of oil. However, it doesn’t even begin to touch the amount that is still in the ground. It should also be noted that a huge number of oil wells in the US are capped and sit idle, though they could be pumping oil.
This is amazing enough, but what is even more astounding is the amount of oil in shale oil reserves. Shale oil fields yield not only crude oil but also natural gas. Shale oil is oil that is locked into porous shale deposits under the ground. I’m including “tight oil” in this because tight oil is the same, except that instead of shale, the rock is sandstone and similar.
A well-known example of an oil shale field is the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota and eastern Montana. More oil shale fields are being discovered every year. Pools of oil, such as those in the Middle East, are easy to pump and they are the reserves that are most often tapped because there is less that is involved in pumping the oil. Most of the oil that is currently pumped in the US comes from this sort of oil.
However, it is believed, and there are facts that support this, that the amount of oil in shale deposits is many times greater than the amount that is in pools of oil.
A conservative estimate of the total amount of oil in the known shale oil fields in the US range from 2 to 3 trillion barrels. For comparison, the amount of oil in Saudi Arabia is estimated at about 250 billion barrels. This means that there is 8-12 times more oil in the known oil shale fields in the US alone than there is in Arabia.
There is a huge amount of shale oil in Canada, as well, and most of it hasn’t been tapped in any way.
What this means is that although the oil in Venezuela is from the largest known “proven” reserve in the world, that is primarily in a large underground ‘lake’ of oil. The total amount of oil in reserves in the US far exceeds the amount that is known in all other nations combined!
Put in another way, the oil reserves of the US contain many times more oil than all the oil that has been pumped everywhere else in the world from the time that oil was first pumped out of the ground.
Some people have put it yet another way. The oil in the US reserves represents more energy than has been generated by all combustible energy in the entire world, including wood, in the past 2,000 years.
This should give people a better appreciation of the amount of oil the US has in reserves.
Good grief, I’m speechless.
That’s a lot of oil, isn’t it?
Perhaps it is; but, if they started dropping wells all over the place where you live and were fowling people’s land with waste water leaks you might feel differently.
fouling and not “fowling”
Actually, they do pump oil in Montana. A lot more of it is piped *through* Montana. Despite what the media likes to report, there are surprisingly few incidents of leakage. There is a lot more of it in ocean transport of oil, such as when it is shipped by super-tankers.
I should mention that most leaks in the pumps and pipes occur where the pumps and pipes are many decades old, before technology advanced enough to make them relatively safe.
http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/27/saltwater-spills-leave-north-dakota-farmland-sterile-for-years/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents_in_the_United_States_in_the_21st_century
There is hardly a spill or an accident to be seen here.
America needs to use what we have and stop buying. Its like a show of hoarders! make it here, put people back to work, keep the money in the USA.
You are absolutely right. It is starting to be done again, but it should have never moved away from that way, to begin with. Of course, that started right after WWII and it was a way of helping our allies, but once they got back on their feet, they should have been weaned.
This us amazing indeed. I never ever thought that in America there’s an pol deposits. Thanks for sharing.
The amount of oil that is pumped out of the ground every day in the US is enormous. The really astounding part, though, is that the amount of oil that is being pumped is nowhere near full production. That also doesn’t count hundreds of millions of barrels of oil that are stored in holding tanks throughout the country.
It is an amazing fact that our nation has a lot of oil reserves that can be used. It bothers me that the news media only talk about the dangers of getting oil reserves because it ruin the environment.
That is simple hypocrisy. Those same news media get most of the power they use to broadcast and to print from fossil-fuel power plants, including coal plants. The simple fact is that the oil can be extracted with almost no negative impact to the environment.
They made the same doom-and-gloom statements about the pipeline in Alaska. It turns out that the Alaska pipeline has actually helped countless animals, many of which actually huddle next to the pipeline in the winter for warmth.
I did not know that the media is wrong about the dangers of the Alaska pipeline not harming anyone. Thanks for sharing the truth of this story.
The United States should stop buying oil from other countries. The oil companies can use the oil that is in the USA and be concerned only with domestic production.
People have been calling for this to happen for a long time now. It could be done. The current president is the first one in many decades who has said that he would like to see a time in the near future where we export much more oil than we import. Of course, one problem is that nearly all of the oil companies we buy fuel from in the US are owned by overseas companies.
I had no idea we had so much. Good to know.
Many people don’t. The Bakken oil fields have proved that the oil can be extracted, too. Truth is that if the rest of the world refused to sell oil to the US, people here wouldn’t notice any change. For that matter, we have the capability of being the number one exporter of oil in the world, though it is doubtful that it would ever happen. Strategically, it makes sense to let other countries run out of oil while we sit on ours. If they ever do run out of oil elsewhere, Canada will likely to have the biggest reserves at that point, because they’ve barely tapped their wealth of oil.