Suppose I buy some land, including mineral and petroleum rights. Is there any chance I could encounter unknown oil reserves anywhere in North America?
My feeling is that the whole continent has been well-surveyed for oil and there’s virtually no possibility I would become the next oil baron of East Jesus, Nevada.
Everybody and their brother is fighting over a field in northern Alaska. There is oil off the coast of California (within what we claim as our territory). There may be some within that range off the Gulf states left and certainly more out farther. There are probably places where oil could be found in other states, but not enough to be productive or either too expensive to retrieve.
If you mean a big strike, no, you’re unlikely to find huge unknown reserves. But if you mean a little bit of oil, sure, in many States you can almost get enough out to make it worth your while. I used to own a piece of property that had oil and gas beneath it, the oil of which two of my neighbours were extracting with a single grasshopper oil pump each. Well actually they didn’t get any money, the oil company had bought the rights to their oil via a 99 year lease. I guess it was economic enough to run the pumps, although it may not have been economic to drill a new well…
I heard a couple of years ago they were drilling wells in western Iowa.
Haven’t heard anything recently. FWIW south central Iowa has several strip coal mines.
Upstate New York and Northern Vermont have small gas and oil traps/deposits. Back in the 1970’s, an exploration group (The Cambrian Corp.) secured leases and drilled some test wells in Vermont (along the Lake Champlain valley). They found some small gas pockets…but these were too small to be economically extracted. The problem is that there are no very large oilfields in these regions…and hitting a pocket might yield you a few hundred barrels a day, or 10 barrels a day…there is just no way to tell…you must drill and hope.
These types of deposits are not of interest to major oil companies…not when they can drill a well anywhere in Saudi Arabia, and realize a flow of thousands of barrels a day.
Of course, if the late Dr. Thomas Gold is right, areas underlain by granitic rock (i.e. the White Mountains) might well be found to have deposits of oil…you just have to spend a fortune drilling through that tough granite!
Oil and gas wells are really two different things. And gas well can not have any hydrocarbons too (eg., helium & carbon dioxide wells). This is a WAG but the wells in Iowa could have methane gas wells. They drilled a whole bunch in coal mining area in my state recently. Middle America does have oil fields AFAIK though.
Where I’m at new oil wells continue to be drilled, though I natural gas wells out pace them. There is more oil and gas out there IMO. It really hasn’t all been looked for either. Dawson Geophysical expanded recently and they essentially look for new stuff via seismic technology.
The trick with really new stuff in non-oil&gas area is that it has to be economically viable with something isolated. You’ve got to have refineries, pipelines, companies, and personnel to exploit it. I has to be pretty big and pretty definite.
I own ‘small’ working interests in several oil leases, and I can assure you that I’m more like Jed Clampet before his move to Beverly Hills than after. Equipment maintenance, well maintenance, prices, regulations, out of this world taxes and price fluccuations make it a tough business IMO. Lots of small independents are definitely strictly middle class folks makeing their living IMO.
Quote Machetero
This is a WAG but the wells in Iowa could have methane gas wells.
Nope they were oil wells.
We do have lots of underground natural gas storage around here due to the geologic structure.
If Uncle Jed can, anybody can…
Nitpick: You are not going to find helium occuring without the presence of natural gas (hydrocarbons).
I didn’t lnow there were any transferable, privately owned mineral and gas rights left in the US. Where I come from, Bakersfield, there certainly aren’t.
Peace,
mangeorge
There are. Look at energynet.com .
Is it time for “Ask the oilwell owner?”
I am from a family of oilwell owners, drillers, and producers. I’m in Ohio. I own a portion of around 200 wells and used to work as an oilfield roustabout. I’ll answer any questions I can.
New wells are definitely still being drilled. If the price of oil stays high, the rate of drilling will probably increase, though it is an extremely expensive endeavor. Old wells are still being produced here, often with great success. You might be surprised by the amount of oil and gas activity there is in various parts of the midwest and Appalachia.
I worked my through college as a roughneck in the oil fields in Oklahoma and Texas. My brother just went back to the oilfields as a Driller to make ends meet while his bar business is slow (O.K. it’s Oklahoma, so technically it’s a tavern). The number of wells in that area is increasing all the time. I’d have to say there’s lots of oil left in the ground. There’s no more ‘gushers’ because rigs are designed to prevent that from happening.
E3
Sure there’s a lot of crude left in the ground, some of it put there by oil companies. The thing is, there’s good (sweet) crude and there’s not-so-good (sour) crude and everything in between.
Some of the crude from Saudi and Iraq (and yes, a little from Texas) can pretty near be pumped directly into your gas tank. Ok, that’s an oil business exaggeration, but I think **jsgoddess ** can confirm that a lot of american crude won’t be utilized until the good stuff is no longer available.
That site requires registration, but from looking at their map I can see that there are indeed plenty of sites still available, mostly in the mid and south west. None in California, though. It’s my understanding that through some chicanery the railroads (and others) glommed all the mineral rights in the west back in the day.
If there is oil under your property, and the rights owners want to get at it, they have to pay you a royalty. There is some of that happening in Bakersfield.
There are differences in pricing between various types of crude, yes. We don’t get what some of the WTI producers would get per barrel, but we’re talking a 2-3 dollar variance, not a “don’t produce at all while we buy over here” variance. The problem with American crude oil production in this region is the expense of drilling and the lack of drilling sites, not a lack of market. As the prices on the crude goes up or stays high, the expense of drilling is more easily compensated for.
I don’t know if certain regions can produce oil that no one wants, but that isn’t the case here.
There are two factors that keep crude in the ground in the Bakersfield area, if I understand it correctly. One is if the oil is “sour”, which means it contains a lot of sulphur. The other is if it is “heavy”, meaning it is basically thick (high viscosity) and difficult to handle and to refine. Recently developed methods and catalysts are changing all that though.
I’m no expert, for sure. I’ve worked for oil and oil service companies all my life and what I do know comes from working in oilfields and refineries most of that time.
Yes, we can and do continue to find new, commercially viable oil reserves in the U.S., although the search for natural gas is the main motivator for our drilling efforts. As of Friday there were 1,207 rigs drilling in the U.S.
The energynet.com site represents just one acquisitions and divestitures auction and does not reflect the availability of mineral rights for the entire country. That is to say, there are a lot more mineral rights available for trade than are shown on their site’s map.
That’s not quite how it works. Their is mineral ownership and surface ownership involved here. Mineral ownership may be severed from surface ownership, or it may not be. Generally in the U.S., if you own the surface but not the minerals, the mineral owners can do whatever is necessary to evaluate and extract said minerals. While they must pay you for damages, they do not pay you royalties.
Typically, royalties are paid to the owners of the mineral rights by those (eg., an oil company) who have taken a mineral lease from said owners and are producing revenue from extraction and marketing of the minerals. Some royalties may be paid to some of those who’ve participated in getting the deal put together and done. IOW, an original mineral owner might be getting 20% of the income from a well, but there might also be a geologist getting 1.5%, a broker getting another 1%, etc.
I know a family with two wells on their land, a small ranch, who for at least a couple generations have been getting quite a bit of money every year from an oil company. There’s also a church, by Greenacres (a suburb of Bakersfield), which has also been getting an income from a pumper on it’s land for longer than I can remember. Maybe things are different in Texas, and maybe this income isn’t called “royalty”, but as far as I know if they put a pump on your land, you get money.
Makes sense, if you think about it.
It is true, though, that you can’t stop them from getting their oil.
Are you saying, Ringo, that in Texas the rights owner can come in and drill a hole in your yard, plop down a pump, erect a collection tank or run a pipeline, and just pay the owner for the grass they tore up?
Ok, I’m being a smartass. But what do the companies pay if they want to pump crude on your one acre back yard. Many wells are viable for decades. and many of them make quite a lot (to me) of money.
latest issue of national G has a lot of info on this. Seems the next frontier is deep water drilling in the gulf, made possible by the ever evolving technical advances. Cost of extraction will continue to climb.