What’s true in athletics is also true with energy production: You can’t get good results if you don’t do the drills.
Policy-makers and investors alike ought to keep that lesson in mind as they assess, and celebrate, a new study showing that North Dakota and Montana have between 3 billion and 4.3 billion barrels of “technically recoverable” oil in a place known as the Bakken Formation. The formation’s potential had long been recognized, but the vast bulk of its reserves had been dismissed as being beyond the reach of available technology.
In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey said only 151 million barrels were technically recoverable from the formation. But the same agency reported April 10 that new, horizontal-drilling technology now makes accessible 25 times that amount. That would make it by far the largest recoverable oil area in the 48 mainland states — and, if available all at once, it could replace every drop of American oil imports for about 10 months.
But here’s where the story gets even better: Estimates of total oil deposits in the Bakken Formation run between 170 billion and 400 billion barrels, or in other words, up to 100 times the size of even the new estimate of what is “technically recoverable.” That’s where the lesson really comes in: If, in 13 years, technology has improved enough to multiply the recoverable assets by 25 times, what’s to say that technological advancements won’t make available the rest of these vast reserves in an additional 10 or 20 years?
Yet we can’t get to any of the oil until we start drilling. Policy-makers must not allow to happen with the Bakken Formation what has occurred with the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, where 10 billion barrels of oil have gone untouched for a quarter-century because of utterly spurious environmental fears.
Also, huge deposits of oil and natural gas continue to go untapped off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, again due to environmental hysteria. The truth is that leaks and spills from tankers carrying imported oil and gas exceed, by a large margin, the minuscule problems caused by the far safer use of pipelines from offshore drilling.
New discoveries and estimates from places such as the Bakken Formation and from the Marcellus natural gas fields in Pennsylvania continue to show that the United States has the resources and the wherewithal to be almost “energy independent.” What is lacking is not opportunity, but will.
