North Dakota-Montana Oil Well Has 4.3 Billion More Barrels Of Reserves

April 12, 2008 12:56 a.m. EST

Bismarck, ND (AHN) - An oil well in the Bakken area of North Dakota and Montana contains 4.3 billion more barrles of oil reserves, a new assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey indicates.

USGS released the revised estimate Thursday of oil reserves in the Bakken shale formation, a 25,000-square-mile area that extends to Canada's Saskatchewan and Manitoba provinces.

In its original study in 1995, the agency found 150 million barrels of recoverable oil from the Bakken using technology at the time. The additional reserve is 25 times the initial estimate and makes the oil well's reserves the largest outside of Alaska.