A Billion Barrels of Bakken Oil: So What?

The headline says: “BAKKEN OIL FIELDS MARK BILLIONTH BARREL OF OIL.”

Wow, sounds impressive. But how impressive is it really?

The world consumes 87 million barrels of oil per day. A billion barrels of oil is merely 11.5 days worth of global oil consumption.

Well, okay, but that’s still pretty good, right? After all, 11.5 days of oil is 11.5 days of oil. But then we read:

Drillers first targeted the Bakken in Montana in 2000 and moved into North Dakota about five years later using advanced horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques to recover oil trapped in a thin layer of dense rock nearly two miles beneath the surface.

Oh, darn.

In comparison, Alberta produces about 2.1 million barrels per day. That’s roughly a billion barrels every 16 months.

A billion barrels is just a drop in the bucket of world oil consumption, especially when you’re talking about production since 2005 and the oil is extremely challenging to actually get out of the earth.

— Read more at Yahoo News —