Wyo Oil Considered Unrecoverable Is The New Boom

There was a time, not long ago, when an oil field was considered tapped out, even though it was well known that most of the oil down there was untouched. Drilling meant going after pools of oil. But most of it is locked up in the rocks.

Most of the oil in any field can be recovered with modern techniques.

The Salt Creek Oil Field in Natrona County, Wyoming, is a massive historic petroleum deposit. Discovered in 1889, it has produced over 650 million barrels of oil and sits within a regional basin holding an estimated 2.7 billion barrels of recoverable crude.

Back in the late 1800's to early 1900s, initial shallow wells supplied unrefined lubricant to railroads, hauled by horse-drawn wagons to Casper.

The peak came in the 1920s as the area became the largest-producing oil field in the Rocky Mountains and briefly one of the largest globally.

Just when the rest of the oil in the area was considered unrecoverable, new recovery methods have opened this massive reserve up again.

Salt Creek Oil Field in Natrona County utilizes advanced 3-D seismic imaging, non-surface-disturbing exploratory methods, and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques like carbon dioxide (CO₂) injection rather than traditional heavy drilling.

There are estimates that over 1 billion barrels of oil remain in the ground at the historic Salt Creek Oil Field in Natrona County, Wyoming.

Let's not forget that this was the site of the famous Teapot Dome Scandal. That scandal rocked a nation. The Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall secretly leased federal naval oil reserves in Wyoming and California to private oil companies in exchange for roughly $400,000 in bribes, making him the first U.S. cabinet member imprisoned for a crime committed in office. A major 1920s U.S. political corruption case involving the secret, non-competitive leasing and private oil tycoons in exchange for massive bribes