Jul 4, 2008 6:39 am US/Central
In The Know: There's Oil In The Dakota Hills!
(WCCO)
Congress
is fighting over the price of a gallon of gasoline and whether to open up some environmentally
sensitive areas off-shore and in the arctic to drilling. Don Shelby said some
folks say there is more oil in North Dakota
than in Saudi Arabia.
It
is known as the Bakken formation. When a barrel of oil was going for $10, it
wasn't worthwhile drilling, but at $145 a barrel, North Dakota is looking at a possible oil
boom.
New
techniques, called horizontal drilling, may be able to reach what one estimate
suggested was 500 billion barrels of oil in the formation. That's more than in
all of Saudi Arabia.
If
you could bring it all up, the U.S.
could bury OPEC and go completely independent of other nation's petroleum -- but,
there's the rub.
The
U.S. Geological Survey says maybe you could fairly easily recover one percent
of that. Others disagree, including two
businessmen from Wayzata who believe enough to have bought up large chunks of
the formation and the promise of a trillion dollar payday.
If
the dream comes true, we could really celebrate our new independence, and we
could just forget all about that nonsense about alternative fuels and efficient
automobiles, and then let our children worry about what to do when the well
runs dry.
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