Untapped Oil Reserves in the US?

Where does the US have most of it's potential oil fields? Is the Arctic Wildlife Refuge the largest potential reserve or are there other, larger ones? If the US decides to drill for oil in these areas today, how long would it take until the oil hit the market?Untapped Oil Reserves in the US?
Offshore has the largest potential. Places like the eastern Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic continental shelf, Central California, and the Arctic Ocean.





However, it takes years to develop a discovery. Before the discovery it takes years of planning and many dry holes to hit a big one. The original offshore wells were simply extensions of known onshore producation like in Ventura CA or Galveston TX. If you start 50 miles out to sea then you don't have the benifet of extrapolating kown geology.





Even with luck and a favorable political climate it will take 10 years to new producation to come in from so-called ';frontier'; areas.Untapped Oil Reserves in the US?
This is a very controversial subject, and it's basically impossible to find many answers that people will agree on. For one thing, if you include oil shale, the United States has about 2 trillion gallons of oil reserves. The thing is, nobody has figured out a way to exploit this commercially yet.





Some people only want to count onshore reserves or only want to count reserves that it is commercially profitable to extract today. Some want to include reserves that we calculate are probably somewhere but don't know exactly where they are.





For example, if we survey 10% of ANWAR and find 3 billion gallons of recoverable oil, can we assume there's probably 30 billion gallons total? Or do we only have the 3 billion we've 'proven'?





Also, it really doesn't matter how long it will take until the oil hits the market. That's because with oil prices rising, people with oil to sell prefer to hold onto the oil and sell it later when the prices will be higher. If prices are going to come down in, say, 10 years because new drilling comes online, people will want to sell the oil they have before that happens, pushing down prices sooner. A key factor in setting the price of oil today is what people think the price will be in the future, which is heavily dependent on anticipated future production.





I'm sorry I have no easy answers for you. But the truth is that nobody does. Sadly, *nobody* knows the price of oil goes up -- it just does. Suddenly, nobody is willing to sell oil for the lower price and everybody is willing to pay the higher price, and nobody knows why.





It's the same with the stock market. You hear bogus explanations like ';profit taking'; or ';speculation';, but these are just after-the-fact rationalizations. With the same everything the day before, the stock might go up on ';speculation'; or down on ';profit taking'; the next day. (And the real question -- why was their more speculation that day or not so much profit taking? Nobody really knows.)



Speculation has it that the Gulf of Mexico has some huge deposits as yet to be utilized. But the question everyone needs to be asking is how to utilize our reserves that aren't the ';light sweet crude';. The person or company that finds a commercially viable means of converting heavy crude into all the many byproducts we already need to have will be one wealthy pup! Heavy crude is widely available around the world and trillions of barrels have already been found and catalogued. The cost of producing a gallon of gasoline from heavy crude is nearly double that of light sweet. Then there's those pesky tar-sands in Canada and our own oil shale plate that stretches from New Mexico to Canada.


The battle is over cheap gasoline, not the availability of crude.
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U.S. oil giant Chevron Corp. said on Tuesday that a record setting production test in the Gulf of Mexico could indicate the biggest U.S. oil field discovery, which may boost U.S. oil and gas reserves by as much as 50 percent.





The Jack 2 well, approximately 270 miles southwest of New Orleans and 175 miles offshore, was drilled in 7,000 feet of water, and more than 20,000 feet under the sea floor by U.S. oil company Chevron Corp., with partners Statoil ASA of Norway and Devon Energy Corp. of Oklahoma City.





During the test, the Jack 2 well sustained a flow rate of more that 6,000 barrels of crude oil per day, said Chevron in a statement.





';Chevron continues to demonstrate its leading position employing deepwater exploration technology to develop new supplies of U.S. crude oil and natural gas with projects such as Jack,'; said George Kirkland, executive vice president Upstream and Gas. '; Our strong strategic position in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico will continue to be a platform for future growth for years to come.';





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Supposedly 10 years. But if we do nothing, ten years from now we'll be in the same predicament if not worse off. This is the dumbest logic I've ever heard for not drilling. I use the same logic when people ask me about going back to school. I tell them the alternative is that however long it takes you to get your degree, think where you'll be in 2 or 4 years if you don't get it--nowhere!! There's also oil shale that's not being explored either. There's billions of it in Colorado. And dumba$$ Congress voted that down. Lost by ONE vote!! I really hate that body right now. Pelosi is a menace. I can't wait for her term to be up!
Most of the US energy reserves are in solar and geothermal power. these are the areas that will make the USA great someday.