The Interior Department has identified a massive basin of oil and natural gas in Texas and New Mexico, enough to cover nearly seven years of all U.S. needs.

"Christmas came a few weeks early this year," said Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in announcing the discovery, which his department described as the “largest continuous oil and gas resource potential ever assessed.”



Our latest #oilandgas resource assessment-Texas & New Mexico’s Delaware Basin: https://t.co/rdu07nAscj We estimate 46.3 billion barrels of #oil & 281 trillion cubic feet of #natgas. That’s our largest continuous assessment ever! pic.twitter.com/KZfAhdmnkx — USGS Energy Program (@usgsenergy) December 6, 2018

How much: 46.3 billion barrels of oil, 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 20 billion barrels of natural gas liquids. The U.S. consumes about 7 billion barrels of oil a year.

“Now, I know for a fact that American energy dominance is within our grasp as a nation,” said Zinke, who has bullishly been promoting the tapping of energy on federal lands.

New technologies have led to the prediction of developing the “undiscovered, technically recoverable resources” in the Wolfcamp Shale and overlying Bone Spring Formation in the Delaware Basin portion of Texas and New Mexico’s Permian Basin, said Interior.

“In the 1980s, during my time in the petroleum industry, the Permian and similar mature basins were not considered viable for producing large new recoverable resources. Today, thanks to advances in technology, the Permian Basin continues to impress in terms of resource potential. The results of this most recent assessment and that of the Wolfcamp Formation in the Midland Basin in 2016 are our largest continuous oil and gas assessments ever released,” said Jim Reilly, U.S. Geological Survey director in the statement.