Why are we not utilizing all the oil available to us in the U.S as prices hover at 110 dollars a barrel? Why do we want to punish the oil producers? Why have we not built new refineries and limited the number of gasoline blends to reduce the price at the pump? The common thread in any answer is the Democrat party and the loony environmental left. The folks that talk about energy independence but who do absolutely nothing to make it happen. So when you are paying 4 dollars a gallon this summer thank your local Democrat Congressman I know I will be thanking my local man Mike McIntyre the blue dog who is Nancy Pelosi’s lap dog. Check out the article below from IBD Editorials. It discusses the recent release of the expected size of the oilfields below ND and MT. Anyone who votes for any Democratic candidate in the face of stories like this deserves the government they get.
The Democrats' Shale Game
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, April 11, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Energy: A North Dakota field holds at least 4 billion barrels of oil and possibly much more. But its Democratic senator demonstrates his party's schizophrenia on energy, preaching independence while doing nothing to achieve it.
The price of crude hit a record $112 a barrel last week, just about the time the U.S. Geological Survey released its assessment of the oil and gas potential of a region known as the Bakken Formation.
The USGS estimates that the shale formation straddling western North Dakota and Montana contains 3.65 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil.
The oil is trapped in a thin layer of dense rock nearly two miles beneath the surface. The USGS estimate may be conservative and is based on current technology.
Leigh Price, a USGS scientist, authored a study before his death in 2000 estimating that the entire formation, which extends into Saskatchewan and Manitoba, may hold up to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil, an amount that dwarf's the 16 billion barrels in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
The technology to retrieve it is sophisticated. Rather than sitting in large underground reservoirs, the oil is trapped in microscopic pores of rock, and companies must force pressurized fluid and sand into the earth to break the pores in the rock. The extraction technology and production process also is not cheap.
In a press release announcing the study results, North Dakota Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan said:
"The substantial amount of oil that it estimates is in the Bakken Shale should attract significant new investment to this region. This is an exciting time for North Dakota's oil industry. We're going to see new growth that will boost our economy and help our country shed its dependence on foreign oil."
Apparently there aren't many pristine areas or caribou in North Dakota.
This is a senator who has opposed drilling in a tiny portion of ANWR's frozen tundra.
He and his fellow Democrats also oppose new oil production in the Outer Continental Shelf and off the Florida coast where China and Cuba are gleefully setting up rigs 50 miles from Key West.
Wouldn't oil development there help just as well?
Dorgan and his fellow Democrats support a new "windfall profits" tax to punish the oil companies for high gasoline prices that are due in large part from their restrictions on domestic supply. They also support an "Ending Subsidies for Big Oil" act.
Just where do Dorgan and his ilk think the technologies to exploit fields like Bakken come from? Hint: It starts with P — as in profits, about which our money-printing Congress knows little.
Yes, oil companies make money. But they spend more than they make on finding new sources of oil. A new Ernst & Young study shows the five major oil companies had $765 billion of new investment from 1992 to 2006 compared with net income of $662 billion.
Over the same stretch, the industry — which includes 57 of the largest U.S. oil and natural gas companies — had new investments of $1.25 trillion compared with a net income of $900 billion and a cash flow of $1.77 trillion.
This is an industry that has redefined innovation, reinvesting profits to find innovative ways to recover oil and gas wherever they find it. This includes fields once considered "dead," vast tracts miles beneath the ocean surface, and sands or even shale in North Dakota.
In Pennsylvania, which holds its presidential primary April 22 and where America's first oil well was drilled in Titusville in 1859, there's a layer of rock similar to Bakken called the Marcellus Shale.
Researchers at Penn State estimate that Marcellus contains 50 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, roughly twice the amount consumed in the U.S. last year.
Pennsylvania Democrats must choose between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom oppose getting crude from Bakken or gas from Marcellus, or anywhere in the U.S. or its offshore waters.
Energy independence? The Democrats are standing on it.
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