Striking Big
An oil company might have just made one of the biggest energy discoveries in the past decade, finding a new field in West Texas that contains about three billion (yes, billion) barrels of oil and 75 trillion (yes, trillion) cubic feet of natural gas, according to the Houston Chronicle
Apparently, Houston-based Apache Corporation hit the jackpot in the western Permian Basin near the Davis Mountains. Apache is calling the new play “Alpine High.” The company started scooping up land in the area two years ago, and now owns about 300,000 acres—or, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, an area roughly twenty times the size of Manhattan—and the discovery could yield anywhere from $8 billion dollars to as much as $80 billion. “This is a giant onion that is going to take us years to unveil and peel back,” Apache Chief Executive John Christmann IV told the Journal. “The industry dogma about this area, all the fundamental premises that most people had about it, were just wrong.” It’s a huge boon for a struggling industry, which had generally pulled back on exploration in favor of pinching pennies, and it’s an even more impactful find for Apache—one analyst told Bloomberg that the discovery is a “game-changer,” and shares for Apache skyrocketed by as much as 14 percent as the company announced the discovery on Wednesday. Apache has already begun drilling, but there’s still a lot of work to do, and a lot of things can go wrong. But there’s certainly a huge potential for Apache to pull a ton of oil out of the ground.
By Leif Reigstad
The Daily Post
Original Post: http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/state-texas-major-oil-discovery-permian-basin