This article was passed along by my friend Richard Francis. There's been talk of the potential of this field for a long time, but now it appears that we're going to go after it, that is unless Congress throws up a roadblock:
America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel oil field that could potentially make America energy independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology, the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America's Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC's short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.
In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present, but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed since it would have cost $20-$40 a barrel to extract it.
It was not until 2007, when EOG Resources of Texas started a frenzy when they drilled a single well in Parshal N.D. that is expected to yield 700,000 barrels of oil, that real excitement and money started to flow in North Dakota. Marathon Oil is investing $1.5 billion and drilling 300 new wells in what is expected to be one of the greatest booms in oil discovery since oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.
The US imported about 14 million barrels of oil per day in 2007, which means US consumers sent about $340 billion dollars over seas building palaces in Dubai and propping up unfriendly regimes around the world. If 200 billion barrels of oil at $90 a barrel are recovered in the high plains the added wealth to the US economy would be $18 trillion dollars which would go a long way toward stabilizing the US trade deficit and could cut the cost of oil in half in the long run.
It's nice to know it's there. It'd be nicer to know that the Democrats will let us have it.
RLC