Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Peak Oil News - How large is Prudhoe Bay?
Considering the circumstances we are dealing with today, you really have to wonder about this...
It's posted at PeakOil.com:
"In 1975, an anonymous ARCO official told Hugh M. Chance, a former State Senator from Colorado, that the Government had allowed only one pool of oil in a 100 square mile area on Alaska's North Slope to be developed, even though the entire area north of Brooks Range has so much oil, that if it were drilled, "in five years the United States could be totally energy free, and totally independent from the rest of the world as far as energy is concerned." The Prudhoe Bay oil field is one of the richest oil fields on earth, able to produce an oil flow for at least 20 years, without the need of a pump; and a natural gas supply which could supply the entire country for 200 years. However, the Government wouldn't allow it to be pumped out, and it is funneled back into the ground. The Gull Island field had a different chemical structure, as did the Kuparuk oil field, west of there, which meant that the three different chemical compositions indicated the existence of separate pools of oil on the North Slope in an area of 50,000 square miles. Needless to say, this seems to be an almost unlimited supply of domestic oil."