In a November 15 press release , the United States Geological Survey (USGS) announced that there might be lot more oil in Texas than previously estimated: The Wolfcamp shale in the Midland Basin portion of Texas’ Permian Basin province contains an estimated mean of 20 billion barrels of oil, 16 trillion cubic feet of associated natural gas, and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids. . . . This estimate is for continuous (unconventional) oil , and consists of undiscovered , technically recoverable resources. The estimate . . . is nearly three times larger than that of the 2013 USGS Bakken-Three Forks resource assessment, making this the largest estimated continuous oil accumulation that USGS has assessed in the United States to date. Energy journalists and bloggers gushed in response; one headline read, “Nearly a Trillion Dollars’ Worth of Oil Was Just Discovered in Texas.” Well, technically speaking, the oil […]