How Much Oil and Natural Gas is Off Our Coast?

by: Lowell

Thu Mar 05, 2009 at 07:48:13 AM EST

According to one estimate, there are 130 million barrels of oil and 1.14 trillion cubic feet of natural gas off Virginia's coast. A study by a professor at Old Dominion University, forecasts that natural gas production alone off Virginia's coast would create 2,578 new jobs, and produce $271 million in state and local revenue.  Unfortunately, the Democratic candidates said no to Virginia jobs and yes to the special interests.  

By the way, I've been searching around for this "study" and still haven't found it. If anyone has any ideas, please email me at lowell@raisingkaine.com - thanks!
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There's a lot of misinformation out there about how much oil and gas might be off our coastline, and how much of a difference this might make in terms of our energy supplies, prices, etc.  Based on 17 years of working at the Energy Department, my understanding all along has been that there's not a great deal of oil and natural gas off the U.S. east coast, let alone off Virginia's coast, certainly not by world standards and certainly not sufficient to make much of a difference in the big picture.

Still, I wanted to be sure, so I checked with one of the top oil and gas experts at the US Energy Information Administration.  Here's the response (bolding added by me for emphasis):  

A total of ten oil and gas lease sales were held in the Atlantic in 1976 and 1983. Forty-seven exploratory wells were drilled. Five of these wells drilled offshore New Jersey discovered hydrocarbons in non-commercial quantity and were abandoned.

   In its most recent assessment (1995) the United States Geological Survey assigned no undiscovered technically recoverable oil or gas resources to State-jurisdiction waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

   In a July 2006 addendum to its 2006 Federal Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) assessment, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) assigned mean undiscovered technically recoverable resources of 1.5 billion barrels of oil and 15.13 trillion cubic feet of gas to the MMS Mid-Atlantic Planning Area (located off Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina) portion of the Atlantic OCS.

   There are large gas hydrate deposits along the continental slope and rise offshore of Virginia but it will be quite a while before any of it becomes technically, much less economically, producible -- if ever. Its not included in the estimates above.    

With regard to the MMS' "1.5 billion barrels of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and 15.13 trillion cubic feet of gas" in the mid-Atlantic region, that potentially, hypothetically represents about 7% of proven U.S. oil reserves and about 5% of proven U.S. natural gas reserves. However, note that the MMS figures are not "proven," but the much sketchier category of "assigned mean undiscovered technically recoverable resources."  In plain English, we don't know for sure if that oil and gas is out there and we don't know if it's economically worth recovering. Probably not.

One other point: total U.S. oil and natural gas reserves make up only a tiny percentage of world oil (under 2%) and natural gas (3%) reserves. The undiscovered oil and natural gas off Virginia's coast constitutes a small-to-tiny percentage of a small percentage (U.S. reserves) of total world oil and gas reserves. And, so far, there's been almost no success in finding oil and gas off the east coast. In other words, this discussion is barely worth having; the bottom line is that oil and natural gas reserves off Virginia's coast are almost certainly not significant from an economic or national security point of view.