--> ABSTRACT: New Frontiers in Old Areas: Rediscovering the Resource Base, by William L. Fisher; #91039 (2010)

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New Frontiers in Old Areas: Rediscovering the Resource Base

William L. Fisher

Nearly 3 million wells have been drilled in the search for and development of oil and natural gas in the United States, making this nation's oil and gas provinces among the most thoroughly explored and developed in the world. Production peaked in 1972, and convention held it would continue to decline exponentially. Discovery and production from the universe of smaller fields or increased recovery from older, larger fields would not nor could not significantly change the pattern.

However, the response of the oil and gas resource base to the extensive exploration and extended development during the past decade in the United States lower 48 was significantly greater than anticipated. With increased drilling, annual reserve additions that had been generally declining for nearly 30 years began to trend upward at about the same rate as that of drilling increase. From 1979 through 1985, average annual reserve additions essentially matched production levels. Oil production decline was arrested, and stable levels of production were maintained through 1985, before the drastic fall in prices and drilling effort in 1986.

Two aspects of the recent experience indicate that we should reconsider the capability of the U.S. resource base to sustain production. First, the rate of oil and gas finding, expressed in volumes discovered per foot of exploratory drilling, decreases with cumulative drilling, but remains stable through extended, and increasingly greater, drilling intervals. This is in substantial contrast to the conventional assumption that rate of finding declines exponentially with continued drilling. Second, the amount of additional reserve growth available from existing older, and generally larger, fields through extended conventional development and recovery techniques was much greater than expected from historically calculated growth factors.

Together, these two aspects point to a resource base capable of sustaining stable production through exploration and development well into the next century.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #91039©1987 AAPG Mid-Continent Section Meeting, Tulsa, Oklahoma, September 27-29, 1987.