In a troubled oil world, the Permian Basin is the gift that keeps on giving.

One portion of the giant field, known as the Wolfcamp formation, was found to hold 20 billion barrels of oil trapped in four layers of shale beneath the desert in West Texas, the U.S. Geological Survey said in a report on Tuesday. That’s almost three times larger than North Dakota’s Bakken play and the single largest U.S. unconventional crude accumulation ever assessed. At current prices, that oil is worth almost $900 billion.

The estimate lends credence to Pioneer Natural Resources Co. Chief Executive Officer Scott Sheffield’s assertion that the Permian’s shale endowment could hold as much as 75 billion barrels, making it second only to Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field. Pioneer has been increasing its production targets all year as drilling in the Wolfcamp produced bigger gushers than the Irving, Texas-based company’s engineers and geologists forecast.

“The fact that this is the largest assessment of continuous oil we have ever done just goes to show that, even in areas that have produced billions of barrels of oil, there is still the potential to find billions more,” Walter Guidroz, coordinator for the geological survey’s energy resources program, said in the statement.

David Fuller's view

US energy independence will persist well beyond its need for oil as a fuel.  That is a remarkable advantage because the USA will have the lowest energy costs of any developed economy, and not just because of its oil and gas, which are now transition fuels until they are no longer required and have been replaced by renewables.

What about other countries? 

Plenty of other countries almost certainly have significant deposits of shale oil and gas, as these are not scarce natural occurrences.  Yes, extraction is still a messy and inconvenient business, although not nearly so much as a few decades ago.  It will never be welcome in areas of population density or natural beauty.  Nevertheless, the economic benefits will often outweigh inconvenience, for which citizens in those regions can and should be richly rewarded by drilling companies.