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Are you ready?

I said ... are you ready?

Seriously.

Sit down ... Take a deep breath ... Relax ... And hold onto your seats.

I've seen this one coming for years. It was inevitable. Perfectly forseeable, to all those with vision.

>>> CLICKY <<<

But as great as the Bakken is, I learned last week about another oil shale play that dwarfs it. It’s called The Bazhenov. It’s in Western Siberia, in Russia. And while the Bakken is big, the Bazhenov — according to a report last week by Sanford Bernstein’s lead international oil analyst Oswald Clint — “covers 2.3 million square kilometers or 570 million acres, which is the size of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico combined.” This is 80 times bigger than the Bakken.

[...]

If Harold Hamm is convinced the Bakken will give up 24 billion barrels, a play 80 times bigger like the Bazhenov would imply 1,920 billion barrels. That’s a preposterous figure, enough oil to satisfy all of current global demand for 64 years, or to do 5 million bpd for more than 1,000 years. Rosneft, says Clint, has already estimated 18 billion barrels on its Bazhenov acreage. Either way, it looks like they’ll still be working the Bazhenov long after Vladimir Putin has finally retired and the Peak Oil crowd realizes there’s more oil out there than we’ve ever imagined.

And Exxon wants in on the action, too.

Good one, OF2.

The Bazhenov Formation could be a monster.



And the locals don't have a prayer of blocking drilling by filing lawsuits or complaining to the Russian Government about the environmental impacts of frakking, either.

Well, maybe they've got a prayer. But thats all.

Global warming oblivion here we come!

No two shale formations are the same. Just because the area covered is eighty times greater doesn't mean that the volume of economically recoverable oil and gas is eighty times greater. I would not get too excited over this.

19 May 2010

But the results of their experiments are not clear-cut. Victor Petersilye, the deputy director of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise All-Russian Petroleum Geology Research Institute, confirms that there is still no truly effective way to extract this oil. Test drilling further emphasized how ineffective the geological exploration work had been - most of the wells were either dry or low-yield. The workers in the field could not understand why wells drilled in one location would produce oil, but others in another location wouldn't. As one expert put it so vividly, this meant they worked like "prowling cats." The size of the reserves in the Bazhenov Formation (meaning those in clayey reservoirs) is very difficult to estimate, and the oil industry decided to suspend operations in the overwhelming majority of the wells. According to the research data, no more than 28 wells are now under construction, although there are officially 82 wells that are currently producing oil from clayey reservoirs. Victor Petersilye considers it a waste of time to try to force major companies to revive their drilling efforts for this difficult-to-reach oil, since they themselves will begin to develop the Bazhenov Formation resources as soon as it becomes economically viable.

Cornucopia here we come!

This is, like, Text deleted. stuff!

Some more here

The Bazhenov Formation (Tithonian to Berriasian) occupies about 1 million km 2 in the central part of the West Siberian plate and is buried by 2,000 to 3,000 meters of younger sediments. The aggregate mass of organic matter in the Bazhenov Formation is as high as 18 trillion tons (126 trillion barrels of oil equivalent). It is known as one of the largest oil sources in the world. About 500 samples from 39 oil wells throughout the formation were analyzed; it was shown that Bazhenov rocks contain more U, Mo, V, Cu, Zn, and Ni than average black shales; moreover, the concentrations of these elements increase toward the center of the paleobasin.

[...]

If the Bazhenov is Similar to Bakken

The 2000 estimate of 140 to 210 billion barrels of recoverable oil could be 15 to 100 times too low. The increase would be because of the improved horizontal drilling technology enabling a higher recover rate.

Hmmm, let's see ... (140 to 210 billion barrels) x (15 to 100) = 2.1 trillion to 21 quadrillion barrels of recoverable oil!!!

I'm not a geologist but I know that fracking is very controversial.

My question might be somewhat elementary and naive but is it possible that if people start fracking all over the place it change the earths crust enough to change the way tectonic plates move?

or am I just grasping at doomer straws here?

This might not be the thread for this question but that is an enormous area to begin changing the earth's crust...

It's also located in one of the most politically laid back parts of the world.

ColossalContrarian wrote:I'm not a geologist but I know that fracking is very controversial.

My question might be somewhat elementary and naive but is it possible that if people start fracking all over the place it change the earths crust enough to change the way tectonic plates move?

or am I just grasping at doomer straws here?

This might not be the thread for this question but that is an enormous area to begin changing the earth's crust...

The amount of plate deformation from fracking is infinitesimal. It can ruin the ground water supply but it can't shift continents. The volume of the cracks is vanishingly small compared to the volume of the plate and the stress redistribution is completely hidden by the elasticity of the plate that dominates on large scales. You could get some change in seismic activity like the geothermal projects produced in Switzerland. Plate tectonics is driven by mantle convection which will feel nothing from microscopic human activity near the surface of the plates. This convection produces plumes spanning thousands of kilometers and occurs over millions of years. The continental plates are like a thin scum floating at the surface of boiling water. Loosely, there is sinking of mantle rock (acting like a fluid over long timescales) below continents and rising in locations such as the mid-Atlantic ridge.

Lore wrote:It's also located in one of the most politically laid back parts of the world.

Since Russia only consumes about 2.5 million barrels per day of oil, there is no "drill, baby, drill" movement in local politics. And this region is far from the urbanized parts of the country.

Anyway, as pointed out above the whole estimate is a crock, which is good to hear.

OilFinder2 wrote:This is, like, cumming in your pants stuff!

21 quadrillion barrels of recoverable oil!!!

Wow, 21,000,000,000,000,000 barrels!
At $100/barrel that's worth $2,100,000,000,000,000,000.00 !
Divided by the population of Russia, that's $15,000,000,000.00 each!

That's gonna be a lot of fine looking billionaires after the male alcoholics find out there is a limit. (Hey Dissident I missed where 'above' states this as a crock?

De ja vu for the original Bakken thread when oil finder was claiming it was x number of new Saudi Arabias.

Some of it will be accessable but it will take a lot of time to work out how much.

>Anyway, as pointed out above the whole estimate is a crock, which is good to hear.
Really?
Help us out and quote the part which evidences it's a crock dis. It must be a pretty dressed up crock, because it seems major oil companies have been tricked into spending plenty investigating it and have $billions ready to develope Bazhenov.
Who ever was sly enough to trick several oil majors into spending billions on a fake oil field obviously didn't see dis coming with his superior ( to the oil majors ) sense of oil prospects. Better phone Exxon now dis and tell them they've been had, I'm sure they'll call the whole thing off on just your word.

The scale of Bazhenov doesn't suprise me. In 2006 gelogists found coal formations under the north sea equal to 4 times the previously known world reserves. Why is this sort of thing happening?
Because fossil fuels are still extremenly cheap. Effectively no one bothered looking for fossil fuel before 2005, but such fuels were still found everywhere en-mass. Now that fossil fuels are worth slightly more than dirt, people are making a half-half arsed token gesture at casually poking around for them, and they finding them in abundances magnitudes higher than before. The Earth's crust is figuratively bursting with fossil fuels.
We ain't seen nothing yet. In EROEI terms oil is worth about $15000 a barrel. Today prospecters are looking for oil that can be developed for nothing higher than $30 a barrel. Such restriction means we are only scratching the surface of how much fossil fuel there is.

The other thing to note is that Earth's original atmosphere was 20% carbon dioxide and was 6 times denser than todays. Today, most of that carbon dioxide has been burying underground by biology. It's now locked up in calcium carbonate and fossil fuel. In other words we'll know we're running out of fossil fuel when Earth's atmos is up to 60% CO2 ( its 0.04% at the mo ).

SeaGypsy wrote:That's gonna be a lot of fine looking billionaires after the male alcoholics find out there is a limit. (Hey Dissident I missed where 'above' states this as a crock?

JohnRM's post puts the actual performance of this reservoir into perspective. There isn't even enough sampling to determine how much oil is accessible and using the Bakken as a reference is a non-starter.

Sounds promising, but it's way too early to say how this will play out. The math is off on the "quadrillion" claim, BTW.

^
Oops you're right, I meant 21 trillion.

Oh well, it's still a big number.

Anyway saw this today.

Russian Shale Development

For example, the national subsoil agency, Rosnedra, has stated that the Bazhenov shale formation in West Siberia could reveal between 25 billion mt and almost 50 billion mt in recoverable reserves – that's 182 billion barrels on the low end.

The energy ministry estimates that Bazhenov production could supply between 800,000 barrels per day and 2 million barrels per day by 2020, almost a fifth of the nation’s current production of a little over 10.2 million barrels per day.

Looks like they're being a lot more conservative than the guy at Forbes magazine. In any case, even that low number is still a big number!

Bakken has unique geology that lets drillers squeeze out some oil, and it may already be on the decline after only a couple years. The highest estimates of what Bakken will yield are certainly off by a factor of 10 or 20.

In other words, we've heard this bullshit before.

BTW would anyone like to buy my house? There are eleventy bajillion barrels of oil just under the swingset, so my asking price of $1,000,000 a sq ft is a bargain.

PrestonSturges wrote:Bakken has unique geology that lets drillers squeeze out some oil, and it may already be on the decline after only a couple years. The highest estimates of what Bakken will yield are certainly off by a factor of 10 or 20.

In other words, we've heard this bullshit before.

Interesting that you say that. In about 1995, the Bakken was estimated to hold 150 million barrels of oil. It has since produced 500 million barrels plus.

Wonderful what a little technology can do, in making the once high estimate a thing of the past, and in only a few short years. People are claiming a higher number now you say? Interesting...do you have reason why THAT number won't just be another in a progression to yet ANOTHER higher estimate?