USGS ups the assessment of the Utah shale oil resource
May 19, 2010The new assessment is that there are 1.32 trillion barrels of oil in the formations. The question of how much of that is ultimately recoverable remains open. In the post below, I used the figure 800 billion barrels. This comes from the RAND study a few years back that estimated the ultimately recoverable value to lie between 500 billion and 1.1 trillion barrels, settling on an estimate of 800 billion as the middle value. In any case, there is a vast resource at hand.
[...] do not represent the kind of massive reserves that would be game-changing. The game changer is the Eocene Green River Formation in Utah and Colorado, which contains an estimated 1.3 trillion barrels of oil, most of the estimated shale reserves in [...]