Episode 6 of the podClast is ready for download. You can grab the mp3 here (14.3 Mb, 24:36), or subscribe through iTunes here.

This week’s show discusses opening up the untapped oil reserves of the U.S.A, the June 14th Japanese earthquake and the early warning system, and the recent flooding in the mid-west of the U.S.

Participants

Chris – goodSchist

Brian – Clastic Detritus

Jess (Tuff Cookie) – Magma Cum Laude

Show Notes

Brian’s post on the Outer Continental Shelf and Oil Prospecting.

My post on the Alaska North Slope and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

There’s a quick video and some information at Crooks and Liars about The Enron Loop and Free Energy Trading.

The Wikipedia entry on the June 14 Earthquake in Japan.

And here’s the Wikipedia article on the 1985 Mexico City earthquake.

Chris at Highly Allochthonous had guest blogger talking about why you can get ’500 year floods’ two years in a row.

Here’s the USGS Corecast Episode that deals with the flooding in the mid-west. You can subscribe to the Corecast through iTunes, or visit the Corecast site.

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Next Episode

We like to have a new episode of the podClast every fortnight, so the next episode will be recorded on Saturday the 5th of July at 2300 GMT.

Contributing

If you’re keen to hear a specific topic talked about, or would like to join the discussion during the next episode (we’d really like a few more voices in there), either leave a comment below or email chris [the at symbol] goodschist.com. You’ll probably also do well reading the details on joining the podclast. If you don’t have the time to join us but would like to contribute a 3-5 minute audio clip to the show simply record it, make sure it’s an mp3, and send it to the address above.

Credit

The audio clip about geologists being the sexiest mean alive at the top of the show was from an episode of American Dad, which is © copyright News Corp. 2008. (Please don’t sue me). The video of that clip can be found in this post.

The intro and exit music was Roots Fi Cool by Burning Babylon.

The splash image on the homepage is from Argue With Everyone. The album art is from NASA.

As a slight digression before I get into the main topic of this article, I always find it interesting to note that the greatest oil producing areas in the Arctic could have been exclusively Russian, if not for the sale of Alaska to the United States by Imperial Russia in 1867. The Alaskan purchase was completed on April 9, 1867 for the paltry price of $7.2 million (~$95 billion in 2006 money) (Wikipedia). The purchase occurred well before the height of the oil age and one can only imagine how different the geopolitical landscape would have been with the USSR having such a large stake in North American land and mineral reserves.

History of Alaskan Oil Exploration

The first major drilling and exploration activity occurred post-world war II with the U.S navy drilling 37 test wells and 45 shallow core holes. This ultimately resulted in the drill testing of 18 different structures in a region defined as the Naval petroleum Reserve, on the western third of the Alaska North Slope (Morgride and Smith 1972). Further Naval drilling resulted in the discovery of small South Barrow and Gubik gas fields and the Umiat Oil field in the early 50s. Following this period of limited naval test drilling, the exploration of the northern slope was slow, but picked up following the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay field in 1967.

Current Alaskan Oil Exploitation and 1002

[Show as slideshow]

The Google Earth KML for Alaska’s oil wells the ANWR and the 1002 (Fig. 1) area can be found here.

The Prudhoe Bay Field is easily identifiable in Fig. 1. It’s the region with the highest clustering of registered wells in northern Alaska and is ranked seventh largest in the world and the most sizeable petroleum reserve on the North American continent. It is estimated to have ~10 billion barrels of recoverable oil and ~26 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. All the reservoirs are Lower Cretaceous in age and sealed by a formation of marine shale.

The ANWR (Fig. 2 and the green patch in Fig. 1) is an area of Alaska set aside as a wildlife reserve for the ecosystems present in the Alaskan tundra. It was established in 1960 via the Alaskan National Interest Lands Conservation Act (USGS 1998). Due to the enormous oilfields present in the adjacent geology, a coastal area was set aside in section 1002 of the act (hence the catchy name of the area), with the rights to defer management of the area to the U.S. Government should it see fit to open the area up to exploitation. The 1002 is a 1.5 million acre plot of land with potentially massive petroleum resources; a 1998 USGS assessment stated that the total potential mean recoverable oil from ANWR was on the order of 10.4 billion barrels (USGS 1998, Houseknecht and Bird 2002). As is evident from Fig. 1, the area of oil producing wells stops on the boundary of the ANWR, and it should be obvious that geology does not follow human boundaries.

An assessment by Sherwood et al. (2001), suggested that at only ~US$30 per barrel, a recoverable quantity of 9.4 billion barrels of oil would be required in order to make an economical mining operation. I previously mentioned that there is a predicted mean undeveloped resource of ~10 billion barrels in the 1002 area. This mean comes from a lower limit of 5.7 billion barrels and an upper limit of 16 billion barrels. Going on the price of a barrel of crude oil as of the time of writing (~US$135 per barrel), even the lowest certainty of 5.7 billion barrels should make the most conservative oil executive quiver in delight.

In related posts, Brian at Clastic Detritus posted and in-depth review of the outer-continental-shelf drilling that’s also part of this political hubbub. It’s well worth a read.

References

D. W. Houseknecht, K. J. Bird, Petroleum Potential of the Arctic Nation Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) Coastal Plain, Northeast Alaska, AAPG Annual Meeting, March 10 – 13, 2002.

Morgridge, D.L. and Smith, W.B., Jr., 1972, Geology and Discovery of Prudhoe Bay Field, Eastern Arctic Slope, Alaska, in King, R.E., editor, Stratigraphic Oil and Gas Fields; American Association of Petroleum Geologists Memoir No. 16, p. 489 – 501.

K. W. Sherwood, J. D. Craig, J. Scherr, P. P. Johnson, L. W. Cooke, Undiscovered Oil and Gas Resources of U.S. Arctic Alaska Outer Continental Shelves, Abstract for Poster presented at AAPG circum-Arctic session, St Petersburg, Russia, July, 2001.

United States Geological Survey, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 1002 Area, Petroleum
Assessment, Including Economic Analysis, USGS Fact Sheet, 1998.