Page 20 ■ Thursday, March 1, 2012
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NATION & WORLD
Permian Basin of West Texas seeing oil boom like Bakken
DALLAS (AP) — The Permian Ba-
sin of West Texas is experiencing an oil boom, leading some of the region’s top oilmen to predict that Texas oil pro- duction will double within fi ve to seven years.
Oil drillers over the last eight years
have found that the dense oil rock of the basin surrounding Midland and Odessa responds well to hydraulic frac- turing, releasing lush yields. Total oil production last year in Texas averaged more than 1 million barrels per day for the fi rst time since 2001. “Right in the basin, we could get up
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to 2 million barrels a day,” Jim Henry of Midland-based Henry Resources told The Dallas Morning News for an article in its Sunday’s edition. “I’ve been totally surprised by the amount of oil we’re fi nding out in the shale zones,” Scott Sheffi eld, chairman and chief executive of Irving-based Pi- oneer Natural Resources Co., told the newspaper.
“We have 30 billion barrels of new
oil discoveries,” said Tim Leach, chair- man and CEO of Midland-based Con- cho Resources. “It can be hard to get your mind around that. The cloud on the horizon is the per-
sistent drought that has gripped the region. Hydraulic fracturing, or “frack- ing,” requires massive amounts of wa- ter to pump into the ground under high pressure. Drillers also worry about the pros-
pect of tax increases and limits placed on land use by the presence of such endangered species as the dunes sage- brush lizard. But as long as crude oil prices re-
main high, around $100 per barrel, drilling will remain profi table. Similar booms are under way in the
Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas and the Bakken Shale of North Dakota and Montana. Production also is climb- ing rapidly in western Alberta Canada, which is now the largest source of U.S.
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oil imports. “I could paint a scenario for you
where we are producing 3 million more barrels per day by 2016, which would almost get us to the point where we could eliminate 60 to 70 percent of our OPEC imports,” Texas Railroad Com- missioner Barry Smitherman told The News. “With that greater control over our own energy security, we could care less about what happens in the Strait of Hormuz.” The narrow straight between the
United Arab Emirates and Iran is considered strategically vulnerable to blockade by Iran’s revolutionary re- gime.
The United States still imports 45
percent of the 19 million barrels of pe- troleum that it consumes, but that is a sharp reduction, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 2005, about two-thirds of all liquid fuels the United States consumed was imported.
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