If shale plays were people, everyone would be jealous of the Permian for getting all the attention. It is the leader in overall national oil output growth, and just last year the USGS announced a new estimate for part of it, the Wolfcamp Basin, which is now thought to contain as much as 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil. It’s perhaps this new assessment that has prompted North Dakota government officials to request a new estimate for the Bakken-Three Forks formation. The last one, from 2013, estimated the recoverable reserves of crude in the formation at 7.4 billion barrels – twice the amount of reserves estimated by the USGS five years earlier. Now, one North Dakota senator says, these must be higher thanks to the constant improvement in extraction technology, Inside Energy’s Amy Sisk writes. Senator John Hoeven says that a new estimate would motivate oil and gas companies […]