LEANING RIGHT-Tuesday night over 200 air strikes into Syria are estimated to have killed 50 Khorasan thugs in Syria and it is just a “start.” Actually this is not a new group of thugs. The administration just gives them a new name because it supposedly wiped out the old group. According to the Pentagon the strikes obliterated 24 separate targets.
The attacks were precise and devastating. Otherwise attacks against our homeland were imminent.
This demonstrates our strength and superior capabilities. The U.S. hit exactly what it was aiming at.
We are strong and technically advanced … and we are getting stronger every day. There is no need whatsoever for President Obama to travel around bowing, genuflecting, and curtseying to the thugs of the world.
Our strongest dependency and tie to the Middle East and other oil producing regimes of the world is the fact we continue sucking on the oil spigot.
This should not be the case since we have more oil in the United States than the rest of the world combined. This raises the question “how much oil does the U.S. have in the ground?” It happens that we have more than the Middle East countries combined.
The U. S. Geological Service issued a report in April 2008 that only scientists and oil men knew was coming, but man was it big. It was a revised report (hadn't been updated since 1995) on how much oil was in this area of the western 2/3 of North Dakota, western South Dakota and extreme eastern Montana. Check THIS out:
The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, and it alone has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable ... at $107 a barrel, we're looking at a resource base worth more than $50.3 trillion.
That's enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 2041 years straight. And if THAT didn't throw you on the floor, then this next one should - because it's from 2006!
Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world. It is more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. In three and a half years of high oil prices none has been extracted. With this motherload of oil why are we still fighting over off-shore drilling?
We have more oil inside our borders, than all the other proven reserves on earth. Here are the official estimates:
- 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia
- 18-times as much oil as Iraq
- 21-times as much oil as Kuwait
- 22-times as much oil as Iran
- 500-times as much oil as Yemen
- and it's all right here in the Western United States.
We have not even considered the Keystone Pipeline, the billions of barrels of off shore oil, or the hundreds of other untapped oil fields in the continental U.S.
HOW can this BE? HOW can we NOT BE extracting this? Because the environmentalists and the President have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil!
Again, we are letting a small group of people dictate our lives and our economy... WHY?
James Bartis, a lead researcher, says we've got more oil in a very compact area bordering North Dakota than the entire Middle East - more than 2 TRILLION barrels untapped. That's more than all the proven oil reserves of crude oil in the world today, reports The Denver Post.
Drillers in Utah and Colorado are poking into a massive shale deposit trying to find a way to unlock oil reserves that are so vast they would swamp OPEC – Green River Formation.
A recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that if half of the oil bound up in the rock of the Green River Formation could be recovered it would be "equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves."
Both the GAO and private industry estimate the amount of oil recoverable to be 3 trillion barrels.
There is an estimated 2 trillion barrels of oil buried beneath parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Geologists, petroleum companies and the federal government have known about these massive deposits for nearly a century. The trouble has always been: how do you get at it?
It is believed that the shale deposits in the Green River region of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming are holding the equivalent of approximately 1.5 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil. Called “oil shale” or “shale oil,” according to scientists and petroleum companies, much of it cannot be recovered with current technology due to the costly processing involved and the depth of the deposits buried beneath the Rocky Mountains.
Still, if only half can be extracted, scientists believe the amount is nearly triple the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.The Bakken is a formation of shale source rock covering about 200,000 square miles of North Dakota, Montana and Saskatchewan. It is currently the largest known reserve of light sweet crude in North America.
Oil was first discovered here in 1951, but due to technical limitations, it has only been until fairly recently that any significant amount of oil has been recovered.
Although the total amount of oil contained in the Bakken shale could be several hundred billion barrels, the oil is trapped within the shale itself, and is consequently hard to extract.
In 2008, the USGS issued a report that estimated the total technically recoverable oil in the Bakken at 3 to 4.3 billion barrels. That’s obviously a significant amount of oil, but much less that what is most likely contained in the shale formation itself.
Recent developments in oil extraction technology have led to impressive increases in the amount of oil coming out of the Bakken. The key technology, hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” has had the most significant effect.
At the end of 2010, the rate of oil production from the shale formation had increased to 458,000 barrels per day, which put a serious load on the local infrastructure’s ability to even ship the oil out of the region.
These recent increases in production have led some industry experts to conclude the original USGS estimate of 3 – 4.3 billion barrels as far too low, and they may be. More recent estimates have come up with figures as high as 24 billion barrels in technically recoverable oil.
Of course, the key to determining that amount of total recoverable oil is in determining what percentage is technically recoverable. Estimates of that have ranged from 1% to 50%, obviously a very broad range.
As with any subject involving vast sums of money, conflicts of interest can play a role in such assessments. The reports released by both the USGS and the state of North Dakota (presumably more objective sources) would suggest that the lower range of percentage estimates are much more realistic.
Of course, the total amount of technically recoverable oil depends in large part on technology, and recent advances in horizontal drilling and fracturing have been responsible for huge increases in production.
A senior manager at Continental Resources, which is one of the main players drilling in the Bakken region, stated that it could be one of the largest discoveries of the last 30-40 years. He based this statement on a total recovery of 24 billion barrels, which is obviously much more than the USGS and North Dakota reports.
Aside from this manager’s obvious personal interest in making such claims, it is worth noting that he’s directly involved in production, and is probably intimately familiar with the real-world application of the technology involved. For instance, his company has developed a technology that allows the drilling rigs themselves to move hundreds of yards under their own power, increasing the rate of well drilling.
While it still remains to be seen what kind of longevity this formation has, and what the total recoverable oil will be, there is no doubt it is the most dynamic discovery currently under production in North America.
The Bakken is also responsible for tremendous job growth, a not-insignificant factor in today’s tough economy. In fact, North Dakota’s unemployment rate is currently the lowest in the nation, and demand for workers of all types shows no signs of letting up any time soon.
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The Middle Eastern countries have been fighting each other for thousands of years and will continue fighting for thousands of years into the future. Following the development of our own resources we should be able to kiss the Middle East goodbye.
We will be able to keep our bombers on the flight decks and on our airfields.
We all remember our mother telling us to go outside and play nice. Once we develop our own resources we will no longer have to “Play Nice.”
(Kay Martin is an author and a CityWatch contributor. His new book, Along for the Ride, is now available. He can be reached at [email protected] )
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 78
Pub: Sep 26, 2014
