USA has more Oil than Saudi Arabia

Reston, VA - 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 almost three years ago 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.

At today's oil prices, the reserves would be much, much higher. At higher prices we can drill even deeper and tap even more reserves.

However despite this huge supply, the oil will sit deep underground while we continue to pay sky high prices for imported oil because the Obama Administration is convinced that domestic drilling will do severe damage to our Caribou, Snail Darter and Spotted Owl populations.

Every hour of every day we spend $41 million for imported oil, while our own oil stays safely underground. And this situation guarantees a steady transfer of wealth from the USA to foreign nations willing to drill oil.

The Obama Administration thinks it is somehow better for Mother Earth if we burn imported oil, rather than domestic oil.

Although it really shouldn't matter, since "greenhouse gases" are "greenhouse gases" no matter where you get the fuel from.

Ironically, the greenhouse gas that the Administration is concerned most about is "carbon dioxide" and is necessary for life on the planet. Without carbon dioxide all plant life on the planet will perish.

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.

Results of the assessment can be found at http://energy.usgs.gov.

The USGS is a science organization that provides impartial information on the health of our ecosystems and environment, the natural hazards that threaten us, the natural resources we rely on, the impacts of climate and land-use change, and the core science systems that help us provide timely, relevant, and usable information.