And they are. Oil fields located in the North Dakota and Montana, known as the Bakken region, comprise the largest deposits of on-shore oil ever discovered in the U.S. The problem has always been how to extract it. New technology has solved the dilemma by allowing drillers to drill down and then horizontally, enabling them to reach deposits in areas previously unreachable either technically or financially.
Estimates from the companies drilling and/or holding leases in the region anticipate an increase in production from the local fields to 2 million barrels a day. That would be more than 700 million barrels a year and would represent an increase in U.S. production from 20 to 40 percent of our current needs.
Newly developed, or enhanced production in fields in Texas, in an area called Eagle Ford, Niobrara, which stretches under Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas; the Leonard, in New Mexico and Texas; and the Monterey, in California, all look very promising. If you add in potential production in Alaska that is currently prohibited and the U.S. could be independent from Middle-East oil in less than 20 years.
But the Administration doesn’t want you to know that. If we didn’t need to import significant amounts of oil from OPEC, including Hugo Chavez, the environmentalists lose their primary argument for the production of electric vehicles. To prevent that, the Energy Administration is offering their own, much lower, estimates of production. I don’t know about you, but I’ll trust the guys who are spending the money to lease the land, build the rigs and drill the holes, over an administration with an agenda.
Even more impressive are the natural gas reserves now reachable. Estimates of the producible natural gas from these fields has exploded. The U.S. has always had respectable natural gas reserves; they now appear to be 4 or 5 times greater than earlier estimates. Even conservative estimates say the new production of shale gas will eclipse prior numbers. So why are we building the Chevy Volt and not the Chevy NatGas? If we were building cars that ran on natural gas (and the technology already exists,) we’d have a supply that would last, at current gasoline consumption, on the order of 1,200 years! Or why not do them all? Build the Volt. Build the natural gas cars. And build the gasoline cars. Oil demands would be slashed.
Along with the new technologies for extraction come another benefit: a much smaller footprint on the ground and much more environmentally friendly exploration.
So why the resistance?
And the answer is: because natural gas is another carbon based fuel. You know the liberals hate carbon. And producing billions of barrels of oil, well that just destroys the environment. Only not. And of course there’s global warming, that doesn’t exist according to those pesky facts about the cooling of the climate over the past decade.
There’s one more minor fact that needs to be mentioned, unemployment in North Dakota, is 3.8%! There’s so much demands for persons to work in the more than 1,000 occupations associated with the new high-tech approach to oil exploration and production, that both North Dakota and Montana are having to import employees.
I know this is one argument you can’t win. Not that you can win any argument with a Liberal, but I’m hoping the open-minded folks, of which I’m sure there’s still plenty, will join me in the cry, “Drill Baby, Drill!”