I Posted the same info twice and thought I should remove this posting

I believe this is mostly correct except for the “light sweet crude” and the government coverup parts of the story. It’s the oil shale fields that were discovered and made public knowledge about 100 years ago. The only difference now is that it may actually be economical with modern means to recover some more of it on a larger scale than has been previously done.

-- Dale Manning, Carthage, NY

Those fields have been known about for decades, no coverup need apply. The problem is the oil is very difficult to extract because the field, while large, is of very low quality. This means the ROI on recovery has, until very recently, been too low to consider recovery. I.E. it’s not going to sell for $16 a barrel, and it is unlikely to substantially offset our foreign oil imports by much.

It’s interesting that they compare the amount of oil available not to where we actually get most of oil from (Canada and South America) but to where people incorrectly believe we get most of our oil from…

-- Derek, Bremerton WA --

We have police officers here!

-- Francisco Luna, San Francisco Bay Area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakken_Formation

“While these numbers would appear to indicate a massive reserve, the percentage of this oil which might be extracted using current technology is another matter. Estimates of the Bakken’s technically recoverable oil have ranged from as low as 1% — because the Bakken shale has generally low porosity and low permeability, making the oil difficult to extract — to Leigh Price’s estimate of 50% recoverable.[11] Reports issued by both the USGS and the state of North Dakota in April 2008 seem to indicate the lower range of recoverable estimates are more realistic with current technology.

Also nobody is blocking this at all.

“The number of rigs drilling the North Dakota Bakken jumped from 300 in 2006¹⁵ to 457 in 2007.[16] Those same sources show oil production in the North Dakota Bakken increasing 229%, from 2.2 million barrels (350,000 m3) in 2006 to 7.4 million barrels (1,180,000 m3) in 2007.”

-- I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso