Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Oilprice.com has announced discovery of 1.2 billion barrels of oil on Alaska’s North Slope, which they expect will revitalise Alaska’s oil industry.
Huge Oil Find Could Save Alaska’s Oil Sector
By Nick Cunningham – Mar 10, 2017, 1:30 PM CST
Spanish oil firm Repsol SA just announced the largest onshore oil discovery in the U.S. in three decades, a 1.2 billion barrel find on Alaska’s North Slope. Repsol has been actively exploring in Alaska since 2008 and finally hit a big one.
The find came after drilling two wells with its partner, Armstrong Oil & Gas. Repsol says that it if it moves forward and develops the project, first oil could come by 2021. The field could produce 120,000 bpd, a significant volume given the predicament the state of Alaska finds itself in.
Alaskan oil production has been declining for decades. After BP’s massive Prudhoe Bay oil field came online in the 1970s – the largest oil field in North America – Alaska’s oil production shot up. But the field saw its production peak in the late 1980s at 1.5 million barrels per day, after which it went into long-term decline.
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Read more: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Huge-Oil-Find-Could-Save-Alaskas-Oil-Sector.html
Great news for the USA, especially for Alaska. I guess peak oil will have to be postponed again.
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Game changer? No. It will just give the Alaska legislature another excuse to avoid taking action on our $4 billion budget gap. It is a nice find. Now all we need is a few more, so Alaska can waste a lot more money.
Great news for America…not such great news for Democrats though!
The rational conclusion is that oil is finitely available and accessible, but this does not preclude that it is a renewable resource. Plan accordingly.
The only thing Peaking is the Progressive insanity. It appears to have run it’s course.
+10
Except the young and under-educated progressive is a vast and undetermined resource much like crude oil.
The insanity may never peak even when they lose the next election as they cannot understand our Constitution.
Related supplimental recent item.
https://mishtalk.com/2017/03/12/crude-dips-below-48-00-first-time-since-november-29-cpi-where-to-from-here/
Not much of a game changer, but it is nice to have, unless they are three orders of magnitude under reporting it it should be listed as trillions rather than billions.
“The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) includes biofuels in consumption of petroleum products. In 2015, the United States consumed a total of 7.08 billion barrels of petroleum products, an average of about 19.4 million barrels per day. EIA uses product supplied as a proxy for U.S. petroleum consumption.”
In other words, they discovered enough oil to feed the United States of America oil for all of 2 months.
And the Saudis will fight for market share during those two months.
1.2 billion barrels can supply approximately 63 days of the current U.S. demand of approximately 19 million barrels of crude oil per day. What are the one time NRI costs associated with the extraction, production and transportation to the lower 48 states?
1.2 billion barrels have a current value at 49 dollars / barrel of about 59 billion US dollars. Transport costs should not be as high as in other cases, since the Alaska pipeline is already built and is chronically underserved. I estimate the gain and transport costs of $ 30 / barrel. That would give a profit of 22.8 billion dollars. Not just a little.
Spanish oil firm Repsol SA just announced the largest onshore oil discovery in the U.S. in three decades
This vindicates Trump’s energy policy.
So the Spanish are back on the west coast of the USA.
Hasta la vista!
I guess no shortage of Spanish-speakers in the US who could use the work.
Save the Plant Kingdom !!!
End CO2 starvation !!!
This is a very nice find but is not anywhere the size of Prudhoe Bay. It is an overstatement to characterize it as a “game changer.” Along with other announced finds on the North Slope, it does confirm that oil production is not yet finished, either in Alaska or elsewhere.
Not a game changer. At 150,000 bopd initial rates, equivalent to one more medium sized oul company. Fabulous for the investor if a startup, excellent for the State, but not a game changer.
North Dakota Bakken got to 1.1 million per day. That was a short-term game changer. Now in long-term decline. The Permian basin is a long-term term game changer. Not this new Alaskan find.
On a regional scale already. And that is exactly what the title was meant. It’s already a gamechanger for Alaska. Above all, because this oil was found on land and not in the Arctic Ocean, where it would have promoted under inhospitable conditions. And an old explorer says where oil is, there’s more oil. Similarly, where smoke is, it burns.
drill baby drill!
What! Not more windmills and solar panels Premier?
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/sa-electricity-crisis-government-unveils-550-million-power-plan/news-story/e2ab8a28eae35758610bee62d52e9c96
In that wonderful British comic strip “The Perishers”, the character Wellington warned us that extracting the oil from the Earth would lead to the gears seizing up, and then the Earth would stop rotating. It hasn’t happened yet, but it can’t be long now.
We’re doomed.
yes and extracting power from the tides will pull the moon closer to the earth…
Do not say anything against the moon. It is also part of the thermohaline circulation, and if it pleases it, it removes it.
Enough to offset its drift away from the planet?
I see in today’s Times that 2 firms have been brought in to audit Saudi oil reserve levels, in advance of the Aramco sale…
That should be interesting… if we can believe it.
No detail expected, just a total and spokesmen are suggesting it will be ‘higher than expected’.
Since the Aramco “sale” is only a small fraction of assets involved, they don’t have to audit everything anyway. Besides reserves, the Saudis could do a lot more for exports and revenue if they would stop making electricity with crude oil and giving fuel away to its growing domestic market. They are making reforms now on subsidies and other waste but then that is compared to a long history of fake reforms and foot dragging.
But wasn’t the big “find” in TX the biggest blah blah?
And there’s the Green River formation?
Keep in mind the crucial aspect is viability of producing the oil.
Beware over-hype from financial promoters.
Good reminder. It happens a lot.
Rguy,
Does it?
Has the formal reporting of the facts and data improved over the years, so that people can extract reality versus press hype?
I do not follow this topic in my reading, so I do not know. What is your take?
Geoff
It makes you wonder what a single test well would show about ANWR on the one main geologic structure there. A dry hole would probably answer the debate. But Dems are not willing to risk the possibility of a success for the nation there. It would be far too positive an outcome to deal with.
@ResourceGuy,
One test in an area as large as ANWR, while yielding valuable information, is not adequate for determining its overall potential for hydrocarbon production. A fair amount of up-front work is necessary (e.g. acquisition of modern seismic data, et al) which would be followed by a series of appraisal wells (along with associated data collections). Subsequent data analysis & interpretation would yield a reasonable ball-park estimate of the area’s potential.
The work could be conducted in an environmentally sensitive way, IMO.
What if the Russian Geo-Nerds are right about “abiogenesis” of oil?
At the very least, it means that the stuff is constantly being “cooked” down at the nether-regions of a floating crust and that it just takes a scientific approach, financial muscle and a non-sociopathic government to “make it happen”.
As Meatloaf sang: “Two out of three ain’t bad”.