Probably NO ONE in our business has escaped hearing about the USGS announcement of nearly 20 Billion barrels of recoverable oil encased in the Midland basin’s various members/benches of the Wolfcamp/Cline/Spraberry.

To quote the USGS:
“The Wolfcamp shale in the Midland Basin portion of Texas’ Permian Basin province contains an estimated mean of 20 billion barrels of oil, 16 trillion cubic feet of associated natural gas, and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey. This estimate is for continuous (unconventional) oil, and consists of undiscovered, technically recoverable resources.

The estimate of continuous oil in the Midland Basin Wolfcamp shale assessment is nearly three times larger than that of the 2013 USGS Bakken-Three Forks resource assessment, making this the largest estimated continuous oil accumulation that USGS has assessed in the United States to date.”

https://www.usgs.gov/news/usgs-estimates-20-billion-barrels-oil-texas-wolfcamp-shale-formation

Of course, to many old hands in Midland , saying that the Wolfcamp is chock full of oil is like saying the sun is going to rise tomorrow—a fact known to those who have been getting their hands dirty in the Permian for the last 60 years.

But to have the USGS affirm that knowledge with a large, large number for both oil and gas –well, that grabs everyone’s attention, not just folks who hang out at the Wall Street bar in Midland.

The techniques and technology improvements wrought by several generations of unconventional shale plays have laid the foundation for this upgraded resource assessment.
To be sure, the resource is vast, and the value compelling, but as we have cautioned in other posts, reservoir geology and facies distributions across basins can and WILL change—- a lot!
There is ambiguity about facies correlations across the basin, what targets are time equivalent as flooding surfaces, and even whether picks on the Wolfcamp D across the basin are time equivalent.
The logs below from different parts of the Midland Basin illustrate the correlation difficulties:

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