The November 12 issue of Fortune Magazine has a article on shale oil (pp. 104-116)that is found in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. It is estimated that there are about 2 billion barrels of oil that can be extracted from the shale in this region. Shell Oil has an in-situ process that is projected to produce oil from shale at a cost of about $30 per barrel. Estimates are that about one million barrels of oil can be produced from an acre of land. Shell is estimating that they could be producing up to 5 million barrels of oil per day within a few years, and could continue for a few hundred years. (The US uses about 21 million barrels per day, of which about 12 or 13 million are imported. So this would not provide energy independence, but would help a lot. North Slope Alaskan and off-shore drilling could yield another 5 million barrels per day which would pretty much provide energy independence, but this is opposed by Democrats.) The bad news about shale oil is that extraction of it takes a lot of water. (That is what limits the amount of oil that can potentially be produced to 5 million barrels per day.) The other bad news is that most of the barren waste land containing the shale oil belongs to the Federal Government; thus exploitation requires support from Democrats. That support may not be forthcoming, given environmentalists' knee-jerk opposition to progress and Democrats' double-talk about the need for energy independence.