Oil Worth Up To $900 Billion Found Under West Texas

About 20 billion barrels of oil worth up to $900 billion and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas have been discovered in West Texas. This could probably good news for the pro-fossil fuel and bad news for the environment.

The U.S. Geological survey said that the Midland Basin, of the Wolfcamp Shale area in the Permian Basin, has these billions of barrels of oil. This is nearly three times larger than the shale oil found in 2013 in the Bakken and three Forks formations in the Dakotas and Montana, according to Chris Schenk, a research geologist from Denver. He further said that the oil has been known there for a long time and their task is to gauge what is the volume of the recoverable oil is, as noted by NBC 52.

The oil is worth about $900 billion based on the market price of oil today. On the other hand, the oil companies must pay for the extraction and processing of the oil. Experts said that only about 50 to 60 percent of the oil will be recoverable. This would make the net profits of the firms considerably less.

Mail Online reports that the Wolfcamp Shale is one of the most productive oil and gas regions in the U.S. It is part of the Permian Basin that covers the cities of Lubbock and Midland about 118 miles apart. This also includes a series of basins and other geologic formations in West Texas and southern New Mexico.

Ken Medlock, the director of an energy studies program at Rice University in Houston, sees this as the birth of a new Permian Basin. He further said that the horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other advancements will allow for the removal of shale oil at a volume will make the basin the dominant onshore platform for oil production. Likewise, Scheck stated that the potential is there for the future, and it is not going to be realized overnight.