As a reservoir engineer, I still have trouble attributing anything over 10% of OOIP to such a tight rock. Oil just cannot flow through those small pores effectively. Likely a lot of the reserves produced exist in the natural fractures system, and even more likely it is a simple incorrect denominator of OOIP. Those fracs go well outside the Middle Bakken as I have seen repeatedly in Microseismic events, so the laterals completed in the MB are accessing a lot more OOIP than exists in the MB. Hence, recoveries are overestimated.
And we really do not know how much of the OOIP in the Bakken shales is being produced, either.
Call me a skeptic for those higher RFs.
As far as the politics of those in govt making resource assessments, I remain skeptical that even those scientists would not impinge their reputations to advance a political cause.
Just look at scientists like Energy Secretaries Ernest Moniz (a nuclear physicist who gave assurance that Iran's nuclear capability posed no threat), or Steven Chu, a physicist who was so paranoid on climate change that he vigorously went after hydraulic fracturing as posing a major threat and trumpeted getting out of fossil fuels altogether as it was necessary for mitigating climate change and was all-in for renewables.
Call me a skeptic that govt scientists are not ready to be politicized.
Some of the government scientists make a living by being politicized. (Climate Change bunch, especially, but there are others), but not all.
However. as a geologist, it dawned on me long ago that aside from some electrical, mechanical, and nuclear logs, and the crumbs the drill bit allowed to make it to the surface from what amounts to an area the size of the quarter on the 50 yard line of a football field (if that), we really don't know a hell of a lot about what is going on down there. Assumptions are made on the basis of uniformity in thickness and other physical properties, which anyone just walking across the ground for a mile and really paying attention to what is beneath their feet knows is never entirely the case.
We have working assumptions, but then we drill into something like Red Wing Creek, and they are shot to hell.
I found a lot of oil in formations everyone "knew" did not produce.
Working in the Three Bar unit in Nevada long ago and seeing some of the borehole imaging logs indicated what we didn't see in samples: voids, fractures, and entire cave systems, for starters.
Watching a NUMAR hand in distress over unrepeatable results in an inclined wellbore in a carbonate until we discussed centralizers on the tool and macrofossil content in the rock brought home that the properties are anything but isometric. Extrapolate that to paleo karsts and solution enhanced fracture systems, brecciation where salt collapses have occurred at depth and other features beyond our immediate ken (slump features, impact sites) and which don't always clearly show on seismic(if there is any available), and there is a lot of potential for hidden reserves which could not be quantified except in retrospect through production. Then, too, there is that little problem of migration and basin hydrodynamics.
It has always been a matter of our best guess as to what is down there. While horizontal drilling will answer some of those questions, keep in mind that that wellbore is the equivalent of less than a lane line on the LA Freeway system, and sometimes those data gained pose more questions than answers.
So, we're back to the fundamentals of core data or log data, estimated porosity, overall thickness, Sw, and an educated guess of Oil In Place. Then we guess how much we can get out, and if we're lucky, we get more...and then try to figure out why.
I am convinced of one thing. The more I learn, the less I know (the new data always raises more questions).
