The US has the largest oil reserves in the world

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Business Insider

The US has the largest oil reserves in the world

Nick Cunningham, OilPrice.com

8h

The U.S. holds more oil reserves than anyone else in the world, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela.

That conclusion comes from a new independent estimate from Rystad Energy, a Norwegian consultancy. Rystad estimates that the U.S. holds 264 billion barrels of oil, more than half of which is located in shale. That total exceeds the 256 billion barrels found in Russia, and the 212 billion barrels located in Saudi Arabia.

The findings are surprising, and go against conventional wisdom that Saudi Arabia and Venezuela hold the world’s largest oil reserves. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, for example, pegs Venezuela’s oil reserves at 298 billion barrels, the largest in the world. Rystad Energy says that these are inflated estimates because much of those reserves are not discovered. Instead, Rystad estimates that Venezuela only has about 95 billion barrels, which includes its estimate for undiscovered oil fields.

Moreover, Rystad argues that there are not uniform ways of measuring oil reserves from country to country. Some countries report proven reserves, using conservative estimates from existing oil fields. Other countries, like Venezuela, report undiscovered reserves. But Rystad applied similar metrics to all countries in its report to make comparisons easier. “An established standard approach for estimating reserves is applied to all fields in all countries, so reserves can be compared apple to apple across the world, both for OPEC and non-OPEC countries. Other public sources of global oil reserves, like the BP Statistical Review, are based on official reporting from national authorities, reporting reserves based on a diverse and opaque set of standards.” The latest assessment, Rystad argues, paints a more accurate portrait. The U.S., then, sits atop with its oil reserves. Rystad notes that Texas alone could have 60 billion barrels of oil.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/us-has-the-worlds-largest-oil-reserves-2016-7

[Ex Lurker]

1. A lot of that oil is not recoverable with current technology

It's either cost-prohibitive, environmentally unacceptable, or both. For instance, you'd have to strip mine much of Utah, Wyoming, and Western Colorado, then extract the oil using a process that requires a lot of water, which doesn't exist in the arid West. There are other possibilities, such as heating the rock in place and "cooking" out the oil, but the technology is still in the pilot stage.

[brett_jv]

9. Def. important to note the difference between 'shale oil' and 'oil shale'

Two totally different things, as you hint at in your post.

The recent so-called 'shale bonanza' involves exploitation (in places like Eagle Ford and Bakken) of the former ... this is 'regular' oil that we can get at via fracking and horizontal drilling ... and what 'comes out' of this process is basically regular petroleum. It's only economically viable to extract when oil prices are relatively high, hence why we've seen a veritable death of the industry in the past few years as oil prices have fallen due to a supply glut, mostly created by the Saudi's turning the spigots on 'full' to keep market share.

'Oil Shale' otoh, while it is indeed in MASSIVE supply in the US ... is really not 'oil' in the conventional sense like the 'tight oil in shale formations' aka 'shale oil' is. You cannot 'frack it' out, the 'petroleum' in 'shale oil' is not really oil, what you can extract is something called 'kerogen'. And there's a LOOOOOOT more processing involved in converting the kerogen from 'oil shale' into 'oil'

I'd bet $$$ to donuts the US has the highest 'reserves' due to counting 'oil shale', but's actually not (yet) commercially viable as a source for actual petroleum. Costs a small fortune to pry the oil from oil shale ... costs are much higher than 'shale oil'. That's not even talking EROEI ... which is NOT very good at present ...

[TexasBushwhacker]

10. Not unlike the cost of mining oil sands

Costly and an environmental nightmare.

[ansible]

2. No surprise, it's always been US policy to suck the rest of the world dry up first

[Sherman A1]

3. And

hopefully we can keep it along with our coal reserves in the ground as we move to renewables.

[truthisfreedom]

4. Yep, because we need it to make plastics and chemicals

so we can get off this planet and explore the universe.

[cprise]

5. Carbon tax. Now.

Keep it in the ground.

[closeupready]

13. +1000.

[NeoGreen]

6. One should always ask, a potential reserve at...

...what market price?

[Ford_Prefect]

7. Potential Reserve versus destroying the atmosphere we require to breathe and and grow food in.

If you destroy the air and the water to get the oil and gas there is nothing left to do with the fuels you have generated but carry the dead to the cemetery. We may have already done enough environmental damage that it cannot be moderated. If the cycle of life in the sea has been damaged enough and enough CO2 has been released it is only a matter of a fairly short period of time until there is not enough there to harvest and that the weather will have changed so much that harvests on land will be radically affected.

[chapdrum]

12. That's it.

Right there.

[4dsc]

8. Don't believe a word of it

It's amazing that since the Saud's have raised that amount of oil they said they had in the ground back in the 1980 they have pumped over half of it out of the ground. Yet the amount they claim to still have is the same as it was back when they artificially raised it back the the 80's.

And the US's totals are mostly unrecoverable as the previous poster stated.

[angrychair]

11. A total shell game

Most oil reserves in US are difficult to get out and environmentally prohibitive to extract and process.

I remember several years ago coming across an article in an oil and gas industry online article featuring a former SA deputy oil minister that stated that SA and most ME reserves were already approaching peak oil and now, several years later, SA is actively working to branch out and diversify its economy. If it still had billions of barrels of crude oil in the ground why would they do that? It's simple, they wouldn't.

[former9thward]

14. Peak oil was first predicted in the early 1950s.

It has never come true.

[angrychair]

15. True but there is a reason for that

Technology.

We've developed more and more ways to reach oil once thought unreachable or turn things we didn't think we could into oil.
We can even use recycled oil.
The point is though that those technologies have a cost and the product they produce is no where near the quality or utility of oil like sweet light crude.

"Peek oil" is a relative term. We would not be extracting oil from "oil sands" if we had billions of barrels of sweet light crude in the ground still.

[smirkymonkey]

16. Does that mean we are going to have to invade ourselves?