Major tar sand and heavy oil deposits of the United States

This paper presents a current assessment of U.S. tar sand and heavy oil resources. It is based on an independent appraisal of all tar sand deposits with 100 million barrels in place or more and the construction of a heavy oil reservoir and data base of fields containing more than 20 million barrels in place. The U.S. tar sand resource is estimated to be 63 billion barrels, distributed in 11 states. This resource estimate is considerably larger than reported in previous studies, which had estimates ranging from 5.5 to 36.4 billion barrels. No estimate is available of how much of this resource is recoverable. The U.S. heavy oil resource is estimated to be about 100 billion barrels in place. With advanced extraction technologies, as much as one quarter of this resource, or 24 billion barrels, may be recoverable.