Where's the Oil?

In the tiny pore space of shale rock, connected over miles, with a combined volume for current US shale plays that is larger than Lake Erie.

There are six shale basins in the USA under production development that are rich in oil. These basins are connected through the Western Interior Seaway that ran between ND and TX, 65-100 million years ago - a shallow sea like the Mediterranean today.

Dead plants, algae and plankton mixed with tiny rock particles as they sank to the bottom of the sea to create shale, and then this organic soup (kerogen) cooked in Mother Nature’s pressure cooker to become oil and gas.

The average US shale “reservoir” is 93% rock, and the rest is open space, porosity, filled with oil and water - about 3% water and about 4% oil.

To calculate an oil column that may be present in a shale basin, multiply oil saturation with porosity and formation thickness (SoPhiH), or oil percentage with the average (combined) thickness (for multiple pay zones) of 560 ft. That’s a 19 ft oil column over a combined 55,000 square miles of oil-rich shale basin

Or think of this “reservoir” as a 19 ft deep and giant swimming pool of oil over an area the size of the state of New York.

Or Oil in Place (OIP) of more than 4 trillion barrels in these existing shale plays is about three times larger than all the oil the world has consumed to date.

Or looking at it one another way, OIP is 160 cubic miles of crude oil. That’s slightly more than the water volume in Lake Erie.

So, I guess it you want to picture the total amount of oil, just from current US shale plays, as a massive lake, imagine Lake Erie.