The Discovery of Significant Oil and Gas Fields in the United States

The purpose of this report is to provide a quantitative assessment of the ultimate conventional petroleum resources of the United States. The authors primary innovations, as compared with earlier national petroleum resource assessments, were to create a consistently constructed and systematically organized data base listing all of the significant oil and gas fields in the United States outside of the Appalachian region and to use this data base to describe what has already been discovered and when these discoveries occurred. From these descriptions, they interpret why these discoveries happened when they did and evaluate the remaining geologic prospects to assess future possibilities. They also present extensive supporting data in the six appendixes forming the supplementary volume to this report. Their principal research task was to construct a data base of all the significant oil and gas fields in the United States that was organized to facilitate resource assessment. Section II describes this data base provided in its entirety in Appendix A, the procedures that they followed in developing it, and its potential limitations. The data are organized into 12 geographic regions 1 Alaska, 2 California Pacific Coast, 3 Rocky Mountain, 4 Permian Basin, 5 North Central Texas, 6 Mid-Continent, 7 Western Gulf, 8 Central Gulf, 9 Northern Gulf, 10 Eastern Gulf, 11 Illinois-Michigan basins, and 12 Appalachian. Because of a lack of systematic field data for the Appalachian region, the data base does not include fields from that region. Section III discusses the distribution of U.S. petroleum resources by region and field size. Section IV focuses on the distribution of significant oil and gas discoveries in the United States by size over time. Section V examines discovery patterns and resource assessment.