Beverly Hillbillies, how many people remember the USGS putting this out, and

how many people believe that if we would have left the Russians alone in Afghanistan in the 80's that the Afghans just may have become civilized enough even for our standards.

How many people believe that if we had, that the twin towers might still be standing, capitalism might be a tad bit tamer, and things overall a bit less crazy, ie. no war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Imagine that for a second and see if you believe that our national security really depends on our international meddling.

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Technically Recoverable Oil Assessed in North Dakota and Montana’s Bakken Formation—25 Times More Than 1995 Estimate—
Released: 4/10/2008 2:25:36 PM

Reston, VA - North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.

A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released April 10, shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency's 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil.

have to be explored/justified/repaired.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/bakken.asp

the oil. They have millions of acres under lease that is peppered with capped wells. It looks good on their books, makes the oil company look bigger and more desirable to investors. There might be more money in extracting money from investors than extracting oil from the ground.

Oh, yeah, and there is no assurances that the oil will not be sent to Asia.

I lived in Minot, ND for two months last summer....finding a job wasn't too difficult but finding housing was almost impossible. The area is growing so fast due to oil. Some towns west of Minot were in a pinch because the added population was causing problems with adequate sewage handling, housing, schools etc.

by "technically recoverable"? and what would those states look like aft5er it is all "recovered"? also no mention of the type of oil there, is it light and sweet (low sulphur content, appropriate for gasoline)?

go forward at a pretty good clip.

http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/192956/
A new drilling technique is opening up vast fields of previously out-of-reach oil in the western United States, helping reverse a two-decade decline in domestic production of crude.

Companies are investing billions of dollars to get at oil deposits scattered across North Dakota, Colorado, Texas and California. By 2015, oil executives and analysts say, the new fields could yield as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day — more than the entire Gulf of Mexico produces now.

This new drilling is expected to raise U.S. production by at least 20 percent, or a million barrels per day, over the next five years. And within 10 years, it could help reduce oil imports by more than half, advancing a goal that has long eluded policymakers.

"That's a significant contribution to energy security," says Ed Morse, head of commodities research at Credit Suisse.

get the same response to alternative energy ALONG WITH USING FOSSIL FUELS perhaps we could really be somewhere within 10 years.

tell Saudi Arabia to kiss our bulbous asses.

BTW, if the price of oil drops, look for all of those wells to be capped.

and didn't find it, but if it is then it might be worth at least seeing the options. 100% against fracing but if an AMERICAN company hiring only Americans can drill it it and capture it as "cleanly" (yes I realize that that is a conditional term and am not trying to claim the process is in any way really clean, but there are mitigation procedures) as possible, avoiding really sensitive areas then it could be barely acceptible in some cases.

after the Russians had pulled out, the nation might actually have stabilized.

Please be a bit more specific.

Current US oil consumption is just under 21 million barrels per day, and our current production is about 6 million barrels daily. That leaves a shortfall of 15 million barrels per day if we want to be totally independent of foreign oil.

4.3 billion barrels available divided by 15 billion barrels a day means that we would exhaust all the "technically recoverable" oil in that formation in -ta da - 287 days.

That's right -if we started extracting that oil today it would all be gone by December 18 - OF THIS YEAR!

So before you go out and buy a Hummer, you might want to consider that.