Bakken. Marcellus. Utica. These three short words represent not just the country’s enormous reserves of oil and natural gas, but also one of the biggest divide between President Obama and Mitt Romney, the likely opponents in November’s presidential contest.

Obama and his team at the Environmental Protection Agency and his allies in the United States Senate have done all that could be done to slow down the exploration and development of the vast and mostly untapped ocean of energy beneath the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Dakota and Montana.