It's Shale Oil time - Again

As the price of oil skyrockets, it's time - once again - for America to reconsider it's oil shale reserves.

What is shale oil? A complete description is here, but a quick explanation is that it is oil locked in a fine-grained sedimentary rock and can be recovered at the cost of around $40/$50 per barrel.

Now much of it does the United States have? Where is it all? How about 5 to 10 times as much oil as Saudi Arabia? 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.

Global technically-recoverable oil shale reserves have recently been estimated at about 2.8-3.3 trillion barrels of shale oil, with the largest reserves in the United States, which is thought to have 1.5-2.6 trillion barrels.

Is anyone presently recovering oil from shale?

Worldwide production of shale oil was estimated at 11,600 barrels per day (1,840 m3/d) in 2002. The leading producers were:

Estonia 5,500 barrels per day
Brazil 3,100 barrels per day
China 2,000 barrels per day

So it's do-able. We need to do it.

With oil - once again - having passed $100/barrel, it is insane for Americans to be sending those billions of oil dollars overseas to oil-producing places that hate us, when we could be supplying ourselves with our own oil at $40/$50 a barrel, and providing thousands of good paying, long-term jobs in the process.

What's stopping this is the government and the greens. At this very moment, Obama is preventing any and all drilling anywhere under American control. True, Obama recently lifted his ban on drilling, but his man Cass Sunstein, the Regulatory Czar, has refused (by order of the president) to issue any permits, meaning that Obama still will not allow any new exploration or development. Obama gets to look like he's on our side -When he is actually giving us all the shaft.

The greens don't want any of that empty and unpopulated wasteland disturbed in any way. To hell with them. This Nation runs on oil, we have plenty of it.

It's time we demanded that the government allow the nation to develop and use this resource. It's time for the government to get the hell out of the way and let us take care of our energy crisis ourselves.