Geology topics
Source-linked reports with geographic coverage including Bighorn Basin Province.
Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated means of 534 million barrels of oil and 939 billion cubic feet of gas in the Niobrara interval of the Cody Shale in the Bighorn Basin Province, Wyoming and Montana.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) recently completed an assessment of the undiscovered oil and gas potential of the Bighorn Basin Province, which encompasses about 6.7 million acres in north-central Wyoming and southern Montana. The assessment is based on the geologic elements of each total petroleum system defined in the province, including petroleum source rocks (source-rock maturation, petroleum generation, and migration), reservoir rocks (sequence stratigraphy and petrophysical properties), and traps (trap formation and timing). Using this geologic framework, the USGS defined two total petroleum systems: (1) Phosphoria, and (2) Cretaceous-Tertiary Composite. Within these two systems, eight assessment units (AU) were defined, and undiscovered oil and gas resources were quantitatively estimated within each AU.
Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated a mean of 989 billion cubic feet of undiscovered natural gas, a mean of 72 million barrels of undiscovered oil, and a mean of 13 million barrels of undiscovered natural gas liquids in the Bighorn Basin Providence of Wyoming and Montana.