U.S. Oil Reserves

[Bill]

from the USGS...http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911

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 April 10, 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.

The Bake is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska 's Purdah Bay, and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels.. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable... at $107 a barrel, we're looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion.

'This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years.' reports, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. It's a formation known as the Williston Basin, but is more commonly referred to as the 'Bake.' And it stretches from Northern Montana, through North Dakota and into Canada . For years, U.S. oil exploration has been considered a dead end. Even the 'Big Oil' companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago. However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken's massive reserves.... and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels. And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL!

1. That's enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 2041 years straight.

[Bill]

And if THAT didn't throw you on the floor, then this next one should - because it's from TWO YEARS AGO!

U. S. Oil Discovery- Largest Reserve in the World! Stansberry Report Online - 4/20/2006

Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world. It is more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. In three and a half years of high oil prices none has been extracted. With this motherload of oil why are we still fighting over off-shore drilling?

They reported this stunning news: We have more oil inside our borders, than all the other proven reserves on earth.

Here are the official estimates:

- 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia

- 18-times as much oil as Iraq

- 21-times as much oil as Kuwait

- 22-times as much oil as Iran

- 500-times as much oil as Yemen

- and it's all right here in the Western United States.

[Dmitri]

Come on Bill, you're not really thinking that these guys care about anything other than their own profits and power, right?

[Darth Rock&Roll]

Nationalize it. Everyone gets a piece of the action and no one pays cut throat prices at the pumps and fuck the middle east, they can sort their own shit out.

problems solved!

*claps dust from hands and walks away from fire*

[qiphlow]

Come on Bill, you're not really thinking that these guys care about anything other than their own profits and power, right?

exactly. fuckers.

[klonk]

And then there is the oil shale thing: http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/30/magazin ... e.fortune/

Spanning some 17,000 square miles across parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, this underground lakebed holds at least 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil. That's triple the reserves of Saudi Arabia.

[shawnsegler]

Yeah, we privatize that shit, knock the fed out of the picture, put the monies in the hands of the peoples and use all that sweet oil to both fund us and pay off our debt.

Nice easy answer.

We just basically say...you dirty fucking bankers keep what you have and lay off the peoples and the peoples take care of they business and we start working on that star trek shit.

S

[Dmitri]

Well, they already tried that approach in a few countries, starting from Russia in 1917 and then in Eastern Europe and China and Cuba and North Korea and...

Didn't work out very well, did it...

It's a nice thought but unfortunately it's a utopia, which is why this stuff is a) extremely attractive and b) impossible to achieve.
Perfect setup to "organize the masses"...

The least we can do is avoid actively WANTING that shit to happen to us, here.

[fuga]

http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/bakken.asp

[shawnsegler]

there's gotta be some happy medium, this is all about humanity growing the fuck up.

It's never going to be perfect, but we can at least say...ok these things aren't working and need to change. Banks being in charge of the government definately needs to change. Living out side of our means, has to change. Not running a long term sustainable paradigm for all the peoples has got to change.

[Dmitri]

there's gotta be some happy medium, this is all about humanity growing the fuck up

I'm not saying things can't be improved, I'm just questioning the relative idealism ("wishful-thinkiness", if you will ) of these ideas...
"Growing up" in that sense will take a hell of a long time. Eons... not years. And that is provided that it is capable of "growing up" in the first place... "Humanity" is a pretty diverse and wild bunch, and it's not very bright, as an entity.
Another side of things here is that "humanity" as a whole IMHO is guided by "collective intelligence" which cannot be known (let alone controlled) by individuals. Like the function of an anthill cannot be known or controlled by an individual ant or two.

But anyway, it is this sort of idealistic "drive" that should be guiding us, so I absolutely agree, in that sense/in principle.

[Chris Fleming]

At the same time, there is the mistake in thinking that "they" have it under control/don't have it under control and "they" are doing something/not doing something about it. The idea that "the government" is a single entity working towards something which would obviously come up with the correct answer to a given problem is obviously wrong. That's why I agree with your first part, that humanity is not very bright as an entity, because as much as it is true that we are all connected, that does not mean that we have a collective intelligence.

At best we have "the times". At one point in US history, it was seen as patriotic to go off to war and now, that is not quite the case. Hard work was once seen as a hallmark of American society, now it is much more like "i've gotta get mine" and you see much more reliance on the government-as-provider, welfare state. Hence, we have the saying, "my, how the times have changed". And they will change again.

[Dmitri]

that does not mean that we have a collective intelligence

I see what you're saying but I'm talking about a "higher level" of intelligence... Maybe "intelligence" is a wrong word, I don't know. An ant hill (or similar colonies) is the best analogy I can think of. That "intelligence" is qualitatively different from what any single ant could possibly ever come up with, in its wildest dreams, etc. Even if he's completely, out-of-this-world delusional/insane. It's got nothing to do with how "smart" or "stupid" the actions are, because our very ability to judge them using logic as we know it simply doesn't (cannot) exist.

Just a theory of mine anyway... haven't read anything about it anywhere; just a gut feeling, seems that's one of the facets of how the Universe operates. Could be wrong, who knows.

[qiphlow]

everything will work out exactly how it's supposed to.

[klonk]

I've been to two world's fairs and a goat farm, and I ain't never seen that yet.