Texas now "swims" in 20 billion bbl of crude oil that the US Geological Survey has "discovered" in the Pennsylvanian-Permian Wolfcamp shale of West Texas.
So report newspapers about the USGS's first evaluation of continuous resources in the Midland basin shale.
Oil & Gas Journal readers know swimming in the subject of this evaluation won't get the Lone Star State very far.
That 20-billion bbl datum represents not even a bucketful of physical oil. It's an assessment of the mean undiscovered, technically recoverable resource.
From outside the oil and gas industry, the concepts here can be perplexing. Even in the industry, words like "resources" and "reserves" fall victim to occasional abuse.
But doesn't the adjective "undiscovered" hint strongly that the number relates to something other than a fluid in which anything, let alone a state, might "swim?"
At least that article didn't report, as several others did, that USGS had "discovered in West Texas one of the largest reserves of recoverable oil in the agency's history."
In fact, the USGS discovered no oil at all. The agency performs many valuable services, but exploration, an activity essential to discovery, is not one of them.
For assessments such its whopper on the Midland basin Wolfcamp, USGS instead studies geology, applies scientific theory, and postulates accumulations of oil and gas outside known deposits.
The resulting technically recoverable, undiscovered resource in this case has a 95% chance of being greater than 11 billion bbl and a 5% chance of being as high as 31 billion bbl.
Those numbers do not indicate reserves, which cannot exist before discovery.
Anyone writing about these matters should know that or learn it in the course of, for example, asking logical questions about the "undiscovered" modifier.
Alas, the article with the swimming metaphor in its headline compounded the error by reporting that the oil is "just sitting there."
Worse yet, it appeared in the leading newspaper of a major city in Texas, where people really should know better.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Nov. 18, 2016; author's e-mail: [email protected])
