Talk of 9.5 to 16 million barrels per day of increased oil production from the Americas

Foreign Policy Journal – Geologists have long known that the Americas are home to plentiful hydrocarbons trapped in hard-to-reach offshore deposits, on-land shale rock, oil sands, and heavy oil formations. The U.S. endowment of unconventional oil is more than 2 trillion barrels, with another 2.4 trillion in Canada and 2 trillion-plus in South America — compared with conventional Middle Eastern and North African oil resources of 1.2 trillion. The problem was always how to unlock them economically.

Analysts are predicting production of as much as 1.5 million barrels a day in the next few years from resources beneath the Great Plains and Texas alone.

An additional 1 to 2 million barrels a day from the Gulf of Mexico now that drilling is resuming.

Brazil is believed to have the capacity to pump 2 million barrels a day from “pre-salt” deepwater resources, deposits of crude found more than a mile below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean that until the last couple of years were technologically inaccessible.

Similar gains are to be had in Canadian oil sands, where petroleum is extracted from tarry sediment in open pits.

Production of perhaps 3 million to 7 million barrels a day more is possible if U.S. in situ heavy oil, or kerogen, can be produced commercially, a process that involves heating rock to allow the oil contained within it to be pumped out in a liquid form.

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