How Much Oil Does The Bakken Shale Formation Hold?
How much oil does the Bakken Formation contain? In early 2008 the USGS, as part of a study requested by the state of North Dakota, released findings that from 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of oil could be recovered from approximately 167 billion barrels total in the shale. Later the state of North Dakota released it’s own findings of a study they conducted and declared that 2.1 billion barrels of oil could possibly be recovered with existing technology. The USGS stated in April, 2008 that the Bakken shale is the largest contiguous reservoir of oil it has ever assessed in the United States. There are many promising new technologies that could extract much more of the total 167 billion barrels that the Bakken shale contains, if the cost of oil is high enough to justify employing them. Steam flooding, CO2 injection and other methods could one day be used in the Bakken shale. At the current price of oil these methods are cost prohibitive but one day that will change. For the meantime, even wi
