Optimum Depth of the South Bakken Oil Shale in the Great Basin

The Mississippian Devonian Pilot oil shale of the eastern Great Basin of western Utah and eastern Nevada is age equivalent with the Bakken oil shale of the Williston Basin and is similarly organic rich and thermally mature. Oil generated from the Pilot oil shale likely contributed to filling many untested four-way structures between central Nevada and the highly productive billion barrel equivalent structures in the Utah/Wyoming thrust belt in northern and central Utah (until the discovery of the Covenant field it was assumed the source rock was Cretaceous shales) and charging the multi-billion barrel tar sands of eastern Utah (the ten billion barrels of residual tar is likely only a small fraction of total volume of original hydrocarbons before the volatiles escaped) and at least the five-million barrel Blackburn Oil Field in Nevada north central Nevada which is interpreted by the authors as a commercial oil seep.