Abstract: Petroleum Resource Assessment of the Pacific Federal Offshore Region - A Status Report on the National Assessment of Undiscovered Oil and Gas Resources

Catherine A. Dunkel

A quantitative assessment of the amount of undiscovered oil and gas within the federal offshore areas seaward of California, Oregon, and Washington (Pacific Outer Continental Shelf or OCS) has been performed for the Department of the Interior's National Assessment of Undiscovered Oil and Gas Resources project. Geological and petroleum engineering data from proven fields and undrilled prospects in the region have been analyzed by a team of Minerals Management Service (MMS) geoscientists in order to estimate the volume of undiscovered recoverable conventional oil and gas within 54 petroleum plays in six assessment provinces: Pacific Northwest, Central California, Santa Barbara-Ventura Basin, Los Angeles Basin, Inner Borderland, and Outer Borderland.

The resource assessment procedure involves development of probability distributions for pool size, number of pools, and hydrocarbon yield (recovery) for each play. Input distributions have been sampled with the MMS computer program GRASP (Geological Resource ASsessment Program), a modified version of the Geological Survey of Canada's PETRIMES program, to compute a probability distribution of the resources in each play. Play-specific resource estimates have been aggregated to basin, province, and regional levels, and the regional estimate has been aggregated with other regional OCS estimates to produce an estimate of the total resources in the United States OCS.

Further analysis to estimate the location and amount of undiscovered oil and gas resources that may be commercially recoverable, under various economic scenarios, will be completed in mid-1995. Formal reports of the assessment results will be presented in late 1995.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90958©1995 AAPG Pacific Section Meeting, San Francisco, California