doodlebug2 wrote:Ok now I am confused, if they did not do this work already (sensors , explosives, chaps) how did they come up with the figures we hear in the news of so many bbls of oil and cms of natural gas. Did they guess?
Somewhere recently I read that in making their most recent estimate for the Atlantic continental shelf, the DOE (or the USGS, or whoever it was) had to rely on info from about a dozen wells that were drilled off the coast of NJ in the 70's (about half of which did strike natural gas), plus they made inferences from exploratory activity off the Scotia Shelf, and even looked at discoveries off the NW coast of Africa (the US Atlantic coast used to be attached to NW Africa). I think maybe there have also been a handful of wells drilled off the coast of Georgia, if I recall correctly. But other than that there isn't much information. So basically, yes, it amounts to an educated guess, at least for the Atlantic coast.
There has already been a substantial amount of drilling off the coast of California and of course in the Gulf of Mexico, so the information there is much more reliable.