3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Recoverable Oil Assessed in North Dakota and Montana’s Bakken Formation

Democrats and environmentalists want to wean us off carbon based energy sources and use the global warming scam, that is based on flawed, manipulated data, to scare the uninformed public into accepting their premise. I believe that very few Democrats in Congress are true environmentalists. They make it appear that they are adopting green strategies, while all along looking for control of another major portion of our economy; energy. Even Obama has said that to realize his energy agenda, electricity prices would necessarily increase substantially. If he can't get Congress to pass Cap & Tax legislation, he is going to proceed to implement the same policies through the EPA and administrative edicts.

We are currently seeing the Middle East erupting and hove no idea which Muslim sect will gain power. Continuation of the flow of oil from these countries is a question mark. In any event, billions of U.S. dollars are paid to these less than friendly countries each year.

At the same time the Democrats have stalled and stalled our development of our own resources, which are plentiful. This U.S. Geological survey names just a few of our oil resources. ANWR in Alaska is another untapped region. In addition, our natural gas resources are immense. When will the Democrats get some common sense and release the choke hold they have on the American people and set us on the road to energy independence?

Excerpt: North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.
A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released April 10, shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency's 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil.

Technically recoverable oil resources are those producible using currently available technology and industry practices. USGS is the only provider of publicly available estimates of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas resources.

New geologic models applied to the Bakken Formation, advances in drilling and production technologies, and recent oil discoveries have resulted in these substantially larger technically recoverable oil volumes. About 105 million barrels of oil were produced from the Bakken Formation by the end of 2007.

The USGS Bakken study was undertaken as part of a nationwide project assessing domestic petroleum basins using standardized methodology and protocol as required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 2000.

The Bakken Formation estimate is larger than all other current USGS oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest "continuous" oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. A "continuous" oil accumulation means that the oil resource is dispersed throughout a geologic formation rather than existing as discrete, localized occurrences. The next largest "continuous" oil accumulation in the U.S. is in the Austin Chalk of Texas and Louisiana, with an undiscovered estimate of 1.0 billions of barrels of technically recoverable oil.

Read full U.S. Geological Survey report here.