Bakken Formation: Will it fuel Canada’s oil industry?
It’s common knowledge that there is a lot of oil in the Western part of North America, but it’s difficult and expensive to get out of the ground. What may surprise some, though, is that much of that oil is under regions that aren’t known as major oil producers —Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North Dakota and Montana.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), there may be as many as 503 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken Formation – a natural geological phenomenon in the region – and estimates say that anywhere from three to 50 per cent of it is recoverable by currently available technology.
The Bakken Formation is a 350 million-year-old underground layer of rock that occurs in much of the Williston Basin, a vaguely heart-shaped warp in the otherwise flat prairies on the U.S.-Canada border. It was discovered in 1953 by a geologist named J.W. Nordquist and named after Henry Bakken, owner of the Montana farm where Nordquist first drilled.
While it was postulated as early as 1974 that the Bakken could contain vast amounts of petroleum, it wasn’t until Denver-based geologist Leigh Price undertook a field assessment for the USGS in 1995 that anybody tried to find out how much was actually there. Read more
