Table 9 

 POTENTIAL U.S. AND WORLD PETROLEUM RESOURCES' 



Area 



Remaining Proved 



Reserves 



(billions of barrels) 



(trillions of cubic ft.) 



Recoverable resources 



under current economics 



and technology (including 



cumulative production and 



proved reserves) 



Crude 

 oil 



Natural 

 gas 



NGL 



Crude 

 oil 



Natural 

 gas 



NGL 



Total U.S. . . . 



Continental U.S. . 

 U.S. Continental 



Shelves (Total)^ 

 Total World 



except U.S. . . 



Total World . . 



357 

 388 



31 



786 

 1,073 



1 



NA 

 NA 



180 



1,575 

 2,122 



900 



13,250 

 15,987 



27 



355 

 437 



Source: Data drawn from V. E. McKelvey etal.. "Potential Mineral Resources of the United States Outer Continental 

 Shelves," unpublished report of the Geological Survey to the Public Land Law Review Commission, March 1968. 



^Calculated from data to Jan. 1, 1966. 



^Continental shelves include State land or to 2,500 meters isobath. 



Any estimate of reserves in the outer and 

 deeper parts of the continental shelves is necessar- 

 ily very speculative, and estimates in the much 

 deeper waters beyond the shelf are almost entirely 

 subjective at the present time. Not only is the 

 geology of these remote areas very poorly known, 

 but there is also no way yet to make reliable 

 estimates of the cost or efficiency of any technol- 

 ogy that might eventually be developed to recover 

 these resources. 



The Continental Shelf and slope are essentially 

 submerged parts of the continent, however, and 

 there is no reason to expect the conditions for 

 generation and entrapment of oU and gas to be 

 significantly poorer on many continental slopes 

 than farther landward. Continental rises are even 

 more poorly known, but scattered data also 

 suggest that at least some of the conditions 

 conducive to petroleum generation and accumula- 

 tion are present in many of these areas. 



There is at present no way to estimate even the 

 potential oil-in-place in these deeper waters, but 

 U.S. petroleum companies are already conducting 

 broad surveys and expensive studies beyond the 

 continental shelf to improve their understanding 

 of these areas. As an example, a recent study 

 conducted jointly by four companies involved 

 about 20,000 miles of geophysical surveys and 

 nearly 60 core holes drilled beneath the sea floor 



to depths of 1,000 feet in water to nearly 5,000 

 feet deep. This investigation covered the continen- 

 tal slope, entirely beyond 600 feet of water, from 

 near Brownsville, Texas, eastward across the Gulf 

 of Mexico, along the eastern margins of Florida, 

 and throughout the length of the eastern U.S. 

 seaboard. This expensive study was conducted not 

 to find specific accumulations of oil or gas, but to 

 gather data which would allow a broader interpre- 

 tation of the basic geological structure of the 

 deeper parts of these U.S. continental margins 

 (Figure 4). 



The success of such modern far-sighted ap- 

 proaches in developing areas is perhaps best 

 indicated by the fact that while the barrels of oil 

 onshore discovered per foot of exploratory drilling 

 has declined from about 50 barrels 25 years ago to 

 44 barrels per foot in 1967, offshore exploration 

 has recently been yielding about 250 barrels per 

 foot of exploratory hole drilled.' ^ 



However, it must be kept in mind that explora- 

 tion and development offshore are several times 

 more expensive than onshore, and without such 

 success marine petroleum exploration could not 

 continue. This is a good example of the abdity of 

 the domestic petroleum industry to meet 

 successfully difficult challenges where the eco- 



'OU Week, Feb. 19, 1968, p. 51. 



VII-201 



333-092 0-69— 14 



