Company discovers 3 billion barrels of oil in West Texas

The Houston oil exploration company Apache has made one of the biggest U.S. oil and gas discoveries in years, finding the equivalent of more than 15 billion barrels of oil in a relatively unknown quadrant of West Texas's Permian Basin, the company said Wednesday. Depending on how much oil and gas can be recovered, the discovery could rank among the top finds of the last decade, including the Marcellus shale in the Northeast, which has recoverable natural gas reserves estimated at the equivalent of 47 billion barrels of oil, the Eagle Ford in South Texas, with recoverable crude estimated at 23 billion barrels of oil equivalent, and Wolfcamp, also in the Permian, with recoverable crude and gas estimated at 9 billion barrels of oil equivalent, according to the research firm IHS Markit. Apache said it's new field holds more than 3 billion barrels of oil - nearly the equivalent of an entire year of U.S. crude production - and 75 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, making it the company's biggest U.S. discovery ever and one of its most important worldwide. The field, which sits in the western subsection of the Permian known as the Delaware Basin, surpasses Apache's gas finds in British Columbia of more than 50 trillion cubic feet in 2012 and of about2 trillion cubic feet in Egypt's Qasr field in 2003. Apache's find is in the far southern section of the Delaware, primarily in Reeves County, south of the eastern corner of New Mexico near the Davis Mountains. The company is calling the field Alpine High...more