USGS Releases Report on Oil and Gas Potential Beneath U.S. Public Lands

If produced, that would be enough oil to supply all of the nation’s needs for 4 years at the current rate of consumption, and enough natural gas to meet the nation’s needs for nearly 12 years.  

The onshore public lands of the U.S. included in the report are those administered by the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Interior and the Tennessee Valley Authority. 

The undiscovered oil and gas resource estimates are both significant increases from the most recent USGS estimates in 1998.These increases are due not to any change in the subsurface but to the revolution in energy production since the previous USGS estimates of undiscovered oil and gas resources on public lands in 1998, when the USGS estimated 7.86 billion barrels of oil and 201.1 trillion cubic feet of gas.  Those estimates focused on conventional oil and gas accumulations and did not include all unconventional resources such as shale oil, tight oil and tight gas (oil and gas trapped in impermeable rock), and coal-bed gas, which are routinely produced using fracking and are now part of USGS oil and gas assessments. 

“The USGS assesses the potential for energy resources where science tells us there may be a resource that hasn’t been discovered yet,” said Sarah Ryker, acting director of the USGS. “In this report, we leveraged our extensive existing data to estimate oil and gas resources on federally managed public lands.  We expect these estimates to be useful for state and national land management, energy futures analysis, and economic development planning.”  

The estimates were produced by compiling previously published reports that included 579 assessment units, subdivisions of the nation’s 69 geologic provinces that the USGS assesses for undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and gas. Resources were then allocated to public lands proportionally based on the percentage of public land in each defined assessment unit. 

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