A three-year study of the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico indicates the giant play still holds up to 70 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
The claim is made by energy researchers at IHS Markit based in Houston. They studied the basin’s key geologic characteristics to get a better estimate of the remaining hydrocarbon potential. Their claim of 60 to 70 billion barrels of remaining oil is based on historical well and production database that includes more than 440,000 Permian Basin wells.
The Basin has already produced 39 billion barrels of oil since the first production in the 1920s.
“When a geologist looks for new oil reserves, we typically go back to geologic targets where we know oil was targeted and produced previously, and in a well file, we call those targets the producing or completion formations,” said John Roberts, executive director, global subsurface content operations at IHS Markit.
Roberts said the IHS Markit team spent thousands of hours and more than three years building the technology and using it to ‘rigorously and methodically’ update the company’s hundreds of thousands of historical well and production records that cover the Permian Basin’s nearly 100-year history.
In the 1970s, many believed production in the Permian Basin had peaked but the onset of horizontal drilling and new completion technology has reversed the decline.