The Largest Single Oil Discovery Ever Made in the United States

Описание: The Largest Single Oil Discovery Ever Made in the United States

In 1968, two oil companies had given up on Alaska's North Slope. They had one rig left on the tundra and moving it out cost nearly as much as drilling with it, so they hauled it sixty miles northeast and spudded one last well before withdrawing.

That well found Prudhoe Bay: 25 billion barrels of oil in place, 213,000 acres, one continuous accumulation. The largest conventional oil field ever discovered in the United States, and still producing today, fifty-eight years later.

But the number isn't the interesting part. Almost none of the oil in Prudhoe Bay was made there. The field is not a source, it's a destination — the end point of a drainage system that gathered the output of an area the size of a small country and delivered it to one address, then sealed the lid and left it untouched for sixty million years.

This is the geology of how that happened, and why it has never happened again anywhere on this continent.