Undiscovered Oil and Gas Resources An Evaluation of the Department of the Interior's 1989 Assessment Procedures (1991) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction: Questions about the Department of the Interior's 1989 Resource Assessment
1 Introduction: Questions about the Department of the Interior's 1989 Resource Assessment
Pages 12-16
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From page 12... ...
Once again, policymakers are considering seriously whether environmentally sensitive areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and offshore California should be opened for petroleum exploration. Central to questions of whether a new emphasis on domestic petroleum production can slow imports and whether sensitive lands should be opened for development are predictions of how much undiscovered petroleum remains in the U.S.
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From page 13... ...
The assessment concluded, with a 90 percent probability, that anywhere from 307 to 507 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 33 to 70 billion barrels of recoverable oil remain undiscovered in the U.S. Though the mean values of these ranges are lower than the mean values from the two earlier assessments, the ranges of values for all three assessments overlap.
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From page 14... ...
In reality, what an assessment offers is a broad range of possible values like the 33 to 70 billion barrel crude oil range from the DOI assessment~ased on the best knowledge available at the time. No two groups of experts asked to predict the volume of undiscovered oil and gas will produce exactly the same figures.
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From page 15... ...
This method evaluates resource potential by grouping targets for oil and gas discovery into "plays" families of prospective and/or discovered petroleum pools that share a common history of oil or gas generation, migration, reservoir development, and trap configuration (Podruski e' al., 1988; White, 1980~. In play analysis, statistical methods are used to translate the judgments of geologists into a set of probabilities that given petroleum volumes will exist within the plays.
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From page 16... ...
Chapter 3 evaluates separately the USGS and MMS assessment methods. It offers detailed suggestions for how the assessment methods might be improved.
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