Texas Oil and Gas Attorney Blog
Recently, the U.S. Geological Survey published a new assessment of oil and gas reserves in the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico. The assessment, that you can read here, reports undiscovered, technically recoverable, continuous mean resources of 46.3 billion barrels of oil and 281 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Wolfcamp shale and Bone Spring Formation of the Delaware Basin in the Permian Basin Province, southeast New Mexico and west Texas. This means these reserves are the largest in the world.
At the end of 2017, total reserves in the United States were estimated to be 40 billion barrels of crude oil and 465 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This new assessment therefore reflects a doubling of U.S. crude reserves and a 65% increase in gas reserves.
As these reserves are produced, the economy will benefit in several ways. Mineral owners will be paid royalties. New employees will be hired by oil companies. Tax revenues to local, state and the federal government will increase.
One of the challenges that production from the Permian Basin faces is getting the oil and gas to market, due to a shortage of available pipelines. A number of pipeline companies are attempting to build pipelines to handle this production, but it takes a while to bring these new pipelines on line. The time elapsed from negotiating easements with landowners to actual construction of the pipeline can be years.