90% of Alaska's untapped oil reserves vanish

The U.S. Geological Survey says a revised estimate for the amount of conventional, undiscovered oil in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is a fraction of a previous estimate.

The group estimates about 896 million barrels of such oil are in the reserve, about 90 percent less than a 2002 estimate of 10.6 billion barrels.

The new estimate is mainly due to the incorporation of new data from recent exploration drilling revealing gas occurrence rather than oil in much of the area, the geological survey said.

via Alaska's untapped oil reserves estimate lowered 90 percent – This Just In - CNN.com Blogs.

My thought was you use a TBM and get the oil before anyone else can notice that it is missing. Would something like that be detected? You'd have to cover your tracks by filling in the tunnels you make... but oil rigs could be hidden in a number of ways.

 

See despite it's reputation for being not in Texas, L.A. has been an oil town from the time black gold was discovered there in 1892 right up until today. As the city's hippie clogged arteries began to expand out over the reserve, oil companies got creative. After refining a new urban design in the 1930s, the wells were all but soundproofed; an innovation that allowed oil companies to start playing "hide the pumping station."

Where are they hiding?

On street corners, on school grounds, tucked away behind shopping malls--hidden rigs are literally everywhere in Los Angeles. There's an unmarked building on Pico Boulevard in West Hollywood which houses one of the biggest hidden oil operations in the city. From the site, 58 wells have been directionally drilled up into the Beverley Hills area. Here's what 58 oil wells looks like everywhere else in the world.

- ats