It is difficult to get the true picture about the potential for oil drilling in the USA. I saw a Democrat interviewed on Fox News who said there is no significant amount of oil reserve available in the US; as proof, oil companies have a lot of government leases on which they are not drilling. Then a Republican comes on and says the oil companies are not drilling on the leases they have because the can't get drilling permits. He didn't explain why, but presumably it is because environmentalists have filed lawsuits to prevent drilling. It is hard to tell what the story actually is since news networks don't do any unbiased investigation. One thing I noted this week in the newspaper regarding this is that Exxon is mounting a major effort to drill off-shore in the Phillipines. There must be some reason they are drilling in the Phillipines rather than the US. It could be that they can't get permits here, or it could be that they think the potential return is greater there.

It is clear that Democrats do not want to have more drilling for oil in the USA. Recently Obama said that he expected the price of gasoline to go above $4 per gallon, but he just didn't expect the pric to go up so rapidly. Democrats are doing a delicate balancing act; they take action to cause the price of fossil fuels to go up so much that alternative energy becomes competitive, then they blame the incrase in price on Republicans. They get away with this hypocricy because of MSM bias.

One thing about the amount of oil reserve that is available in the uS is that the amount depends entirely on the current market price of petroleum. It is clear that not much oil is still available that can be economically lited from the ground at a going price of $10 per barrel. But at $130 per barrel there is a lot. THis partly explains why there is such a wide disparity in the estimates of the amount of oil available in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, from 4 billion barrels to 500 billion barrels. Based on what I can glean from oil company financial reports, the oil in the Bakken Shale currently costs less than $10 per barrel to recover. THe horizontal wells drilled in the Bakken recently appear to have Estimated Ultimate Recovery (EUR) of 700,000 to 1,000,000 barrels per well. THe potential is probably for four of these wells per square mile. The 500 billion barrel estimate is probably optimistic, but at $130 per barrel wells with an EUR of only 100,000are attractive, so the 4 billion barrel estimate is probably very low.

Shale oil in the Rocky Mountain area is also economical at a price of $130 per barrel. Environmentalists are eager to prevent the development of shale oil of course. They object to the amount of water used to recover the shale oil. THey seeem to not realize that even more water is needed in the conversion of corn to ethyl alcohol. THe shale oil can probably only be produced at a rate of 5 million barrels per day because water availability. At that prodcution rate the shale oil would last for 1000 years. In 2004, John Kerry said that an additional 5 million barrels per day wouldn't have any impact on price. Like most Democrats he doesn't seem to understand the law of supply and demand.