Next Energy News

Amer­ica is sit­ting on top of a super mas­sive 200 bil­lion bar­rel Oil Field that could poten­tially make Amer­ica Energy Inde­pen­dent and until now has largely gone unno­ticed. Thanks to new tech­nol­ogy the Bakken For­ma­tion in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incred­i­ble 10 times, giv­ing west­ern economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil sup­ply and mak­ing Iran­ian and Venezue­lan threats of dis­rupted sup­ply irrelevant.

In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey) will release a new report giv­ing an accu­rate resource assess­ment of the Bakken Oil For­ma­tion that cov­ers North Dakota and por­tions of South Dakota and Mon­tana. With new hor­i­zon­tal drilling tech­nol­ogy it is believed that from 175 to 500 bil­lion bar­rels of recov­er­able oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was ini­tially dis­cov­ered in 1951. The USGS did an ini­tial study back in 1999 that esti­mated 400 bil­lion recov­er­able bar­rels were present but with prices bot­tom­ing out at $10 a bar­rel back then the report was dis­missed because of the higher cost of hor­i­zon­tal drilling tech­niques that would be needed, esti­mated at $20-$40 a barrel.

It was not until 2007, when EOG Resources of Texas started a frenzy when they drilled a sin­gle well in Par­shal N.D. that is expected to yield 700,000 bar­rels of oil that real excite­ment and money started to flow in North Dakota. Marathon Oil is invest­ing $1.5 bil­lion and drilling 300 new wells in what is expected to be one of the great­est booms in Oil dis­cov­ery since Oil was dis­cov­ered in Saudi Ara­bia in 1938.

The US imported about 14 mil­lion bar­rels of Oil per day in 2007 , which means US con­sumers sent about $340 Bil­lion Dol­lars over seas build­ing palaces in Dubai and prop­ping up unfriendly regimes around the World, if 200 bil­lion bar­rels of oil at $90 a bar­rel are recov­ered in the high plains the added wealth to the US econ­omy would be $18 Tril­lion Dol­lars which would go a long way in sta­bi­liz­ing the US trade deficit and could cut the cost of oil in half in the long run.