Utah’s Uinta Basin Sees Oil Production Renaissance
From the 1980s to the early 2000s, oil production in Utah’s remote Uinta basin was in gradual decline. But with the advent of new horizontal drilling technologies, the trend steeply reversed, with oil production rising from a low of 19,000 bpd in 2002 to a high of 87,000 bpd in 2021. Despite that steep, two-decade increase, production volumes have remained mostly flat near 85,000 bpd since 2014. And for good reason: the region produces yellow and black waxy crude oil, a unique substance that cannot move easily by pipeline and requires specialized refineries for processing. Those dueling constraints mean that the nearby refining market in Salt Lake City has historically been the oil’s primary destination, and its waxy crude processing capacity has not grown beyond 85,000 bpd.
Even amid an era bearing witness to…