Undiscovered Oil and Gas Between West Greenland and East Canada: USGS Assessment, 2023

What was assessed

The U.S. Geological Survey estimated the undiscovered, technically recoverable conventional oil and gas in the West Greenland–East Canada Province, one of the priority provinces in its ongoing assessment of the world's conventional resources, and allocated part of it to the area north of the Arctic Circle.

Figure 1. The five conventional assessment units of the West Greenland–East Canada Province. USGS.

A complicated geologic history

The province formed as Greenland pulled away from North America, through repeated rifting, subsidence, movement on great transform and strike-slip faults, changes in plate direction, volcanism, uplift and erosion.

• Rifting is usually thought to have begun in the Early Cretaceous (Valanginian–Hauterivian), though it may have started earlier.
• A phase of thermal subsidence in the Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian–Santonian) may have laid down organic-rich Cenomanian source rocks.
• Rifting resumed in the Campanian and ended in the Paleogene, when seafloor spreading opened the Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay, linked by the Ungava transform fault zone.
• By the Eocene, Greenland's motion swung northward as eastern Greenland split from Eurasia and Greenland rotated counterclockwise. That squeezed northern Greenland and Ellesmere Island in the Eurekan orogeny, and along the Ungava fault zone and Hudson fracture zone produced pull-apart basins, flower structures, uplifted rift shoulders and inverted older structures.
• Spreading stopped in the late Eocene, leaving Greenland attached to North America. Since then the facing margins of eastern Canada and western Greenland have been passive, but repeated uplift, erosion and volcanism may have caused oil and gas to migrate again or escape.

The petroleum system

All five units lie in the Mesozoic–Cenozoic Composite Total Petroleum System.

• Source rocks, inferred mainly from oil seeps on the West Greenland margin, may be of Albian, Cenomanian–Turonian, Campanian, Paleocene–Eocene and Miocene age. Cretaceous sources may be confined to grabens and vary sideways; those from the subsidence phase, such as Cenomanian mudstones, may be more widespread. Modeling suggests several have reached the oil and gas windows, mostly from the Eocene to the Miocene, and deep basins such as the Melville Bay graben may be in the gas window.
• Reservoirs are mostly sandstones — from alluvial fans, rivers, deltas, lakes, estuaries, shorelines, shelves and deep-sea fans — laid down during the rifts, the subsidence between them, and after rifting, plus sandstones stacked in incised valleys, and possibly fractured volcanic rock.
• Traps are complex, because rifting, strike-slip faulting and compression have repeatedly reworked the original structures. Regional uplift and erosion linked to mantle plumes may have let oil or gas escape.

The five assessment units, redrawn from those of 2011 using new information:

Each unit was given a probability of 1.0. Input data are in the USGS data release (Schenk, 2025).

Results

For the whole province, the mean estimates of undiscovered conventional resources are:

• Oil: 7,769 million barrels (7.8 billion), with an F95–F5 range of 1,131 to 23,185 million;
• Gas: 91,897 billion cubic feet (91.9 trillion), range 18,018 to 236,136 billion;
• Natural gas liquids: 1,896 million barrels (1.9 billion), range 368 to 4,885 million.

(F95 is a 95 percent chance of at least that amount; F5 a 5 percent chance.)

North of the Arctic Circle, the allocated means are 5,950 million barrels of oil (range 839 to 18,001 million), 69,632 billion cubic feet of gas (69.6 trillion) (range 13,331 to 180,875 billion), and 1,450 million barrels of natural gas liquids (range 273 to 3,781 million).

The allocation counts all of the Northwest Greenland, West-Central Greenland and Baffin Bay Basin units as north of the Arctic Circle, and part of the other two.

Results are also on the USGS Energy Resources Program website.

Sources

Based on West Greenland–East Canada Province Assessment Team (Christopher J. Schenk and others), "Assessment of undiscovered conventional oil and gas resources of the West Greenland-East Canada Province, 2023," U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on work by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and others, including Dam and Sønderholm (2021), Harrison and others (2011), McGregor and others (2014) and Schenk (2011, 2025). Its table of input data is left out.