Assessment of Undiscovered Oil and Gas Resources of the Permian Basin Province of West Texas and Southeast New Mexico, 2007

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) recently assessed the undiscovered oil and gas potential of the Permian Basin Province of west Texas and southeast New Mexico. The assessment was geology based and used the total petroleum system concept. The geologic elements of a total petroleum system are petroleum source rocks (quality, source rock maturation, generation, and migration), reservoir rocks (sequence stratigraphy, petrophysical properties), and traps (trap formation and timing). This study assessed potential for technically recoverable resources in new field discoveries only; field growth (or reserve growth) of conventional oil and gas fields was not included. Using this methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated a mean of 41 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered natural gas and a mean of 1.3 billion barrels of undiscovered oil in the Permian Basin Province.