A new report from the US Geological Survey (USGS) places Wyoming among the top states in the nation for undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and natural gas resources on federally managed public lands, News Letter Journal reports.
According to the USGS, Wyoming ranks fourth in both categories, with an estimated 988.3 million barrels of oil and 57.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas beneath the state’s federally administered lands. These figures represent resources that are considered recoverable using current technology, though not yet discovered through drilling.
To put these numbers into perspective, if fully developed, Wyoming’s oil reserves could supply the entire country’s needs for approximately six weeks. Meanwhile, the state’s gas resources could meet national consumption for nearly two years.
The estimates are part of a broader USGS assessment of onshore public lands across the United States, which are managed by various federal agencies including the Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service, and others under the Departments of Interior, Agriculture, Defense, and Energy, as well as the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Nationwide, the report estimates that federally managed lands contain 29.4 billion barrels of undiscovered oil and 391.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. These figures mark a significant increase from the last such assessment in 1998, when the USGS estimated 7.86 billion barrels of oil and 201.1 trillion cubic feet of gas.
The increase in estimated resources is not due to changes in geology but rather reflects advancements in extraction technology and energy production techniques over the past two decades, such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
