Earlier this month the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) announced the largest estimate of continuous oil that it has ever assessed. The area assessed is in the Permian Basin, a region that has been producing oil continuously for nearly 100 years. Below I will get into the specifics of what this news means, but the mainstream media mostly interpreted it as CNN did in Mammoth Texas oil discovery biggest ever in USA . But this is a fundamental misunderstanding by CNN of what the news entails. The Permian Basin lies underneath western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The geology of the Permian Basin is rich and complex, both horizontally and vertically. The Permian Basin has commercial accumulations of oil and gas in stacked layers, at depths ranging from 1,000 feet to more than 25,000 feet. The greater Permian is made up of several subsidiary basins, the largest of […]