Energy Policy Needs To Be Established, Now!
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 because of the higher cost of
horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at
$20-$40 a barrel.
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 in stabilizing the US trade deficit and could
cut the cost of oil in half in the long run.