Arctic holds 90 billion barrels of oil: U.S. survey
WASHINGTON -- The Arctic Circle holds an estimated 90 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the U.S. Geological Survey said on Wednesday.Of course all those numbers are totally meaningless as noone knows how much oil is there. It's almost certainly infinite as far as human beings and quantification are concerned. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and carbon is the fourth most common element in the universe. "It is obvious that the total amount of petroleum in the rocks underlying the surface ... is large beyond computation." -- Edward Orton, 1888
The Arctic accounts for about 13% of the world's undiscovered oil, 30% of the undiscovered natural gas, and 20% of the undiscovered natural gas liquids, the agency said in the first publicly available petroleum resource estimate of the entire area north of the Arctic Circle.
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3 comments:
What were all them dinosaurs doing up at the North Pole? (Just kidding...)
LOL. Good question...=)
THE CRUCIAL QUESTION: HOW MUCH OIL IN THE ARCTIC IS WITHIN AMERICA'S REACH?
We know there is a lot of oil & gas in the arctic, but the crucial question is how much oil & gas is within America's reach.
As long as pack ice covers the North Pole and grinds against the continent for much of the year, not all artic oil is reachable.
But with "slant" drilling technology, also known as horizontal drilling we should be able to reach out away from shore to "reach" additional "pools" of oil.
A good read to get a grasp of how much oil is available on Alaska's North Slope is Lindsey Williams' The Energy Non-Crisis. The entire book can be read online at the above link.
To give a preview of the book here is an extended quote from the opening chapter entiltled, The Great Oil Deception:
Senator Chance's first question was, "Mr. X, how much crude oil is there under the North Slope of Alaska, in your estimation?"
Mr. X answered, "In my estimation, from the seismographic work and the drillings we have already done, I am convinced that there is as much oil under the North Slope of Alaska as there is in all of Saudi Arabia."
Senator Hugh Chance's next question was perhaps an obvious one. "Why isn't this oil being produced, if there is an oil crisis?" He went on to point out that private enterprise has always come to the rescue of the American people when there have been times of need.
Mr. X then made the startling observation that the Federal government and the State government of Alaska had allowed only one pool of oil on the North Slope of Alaska to be developed.
Senator Chance then asked, "Mr. X, do you think that there are numerous pools of oil under the North Slope of Alaska?"
Mr. X replied, "Senator Chance, the government has allowed us to develop only one 100-square-mile area of this vast North Slope. There are many, many 100-square-mile areas under the North Slope of Alaska which contain oil. There are many pools of oil under the North Slope of Alaska."
The book is an "eye opening" read.
Clearly, there is a tremendous amount of oil ready to be produced and sent down the Trans-Alaska Pipeline -- the infrastructure is already built -- we just need the political will to drill and produce the oil & gas we already know is there on Alaska's North Slope.
And, also, there is all the potential oil & gas offshore in the American portion of the Chuchee Sea that is ice free and the American portion of the Bering Sea, which already has seen some oil exploration.
Whether Alaska and its offshore areas have as much crude oil as Saudi Arabia is anybody's guess, but I know one thing for sure:
We'll never find out if we don't look!
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