In 2001 (I believe) the National Geological Survey found a startling fact: the USA has ten times the amount of oil Iraq has (or twice what Saudi Arabia has, if you prefer) laying around in Alaska and the Rockies. They also briefed Congress on this.
This is just (intended) to be a discussion about the veracity of this claim and how the oil trade in this country should be changed based on it. I first heard this on FOX News, so I'll try to find a site with proof that they found oil reserves like that.
Okay, I've yet to find the report on the USGS website (all the numbers and statistics bogs my mind down) but here's the claim:
The revise US Geological Service, in 2008, did a revised report (the last one was in 1995) on the abundance of oil in the United States. In the 2/3 of western North Dakota (or would that be Northwest Dakota?), western South Dakota, and eastern Montana there are roughly 503 billion barrels of oil (worth 53.8 trillion dollars if all of it was extracted). Needless to day, this is enough to end American dependence on foreign oil AND become the largest oil exporter in the world.
This equals:
8 times what Saudi Arabia has
18 times what Iraq has
21 times what Kuwait has
22 times what Iran has
500 times what Yemen has
If the US capitalized on this, supply and demand would crush OPEC.
Also, Montana legislators WERE told of this (just Montana, but if they cared they would have reported it to National legislators).
The report is supposed to be at the online Stansberry Report (4/20/2006).
err, if it's fox news, you really need to be extra careful. People gave CBS news and Dan Rather a very hard time for that one fiasco, I lose track of how many times Fox News has reported wrong information.
Here are the reports you mentioned, bottom line, it's not 503 billion barrels, it's 3.6 billion barrels.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2008/3021/
actual PDF file of the report, listing possible locations, how many potential barrels, etc.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2008/3021/pdf/FS08-3021_508.pdf
Another thing, having reserve is only part of the equation, how much does it cost to extract it? I am not even talking about environmental damage, but how cheaply can you extract oil?
People talk about extracting oil from A, B, C, how much does it cost? If it's in the sea, how deep is it? The deeper it is, the rougher the sea, the more expensive it is going to be to drill down and have a platform built to extract the oil from the sea.
Canada has a great abundance of "oil sands". The economist was talking about it, as early as 1990-1993, but the cost then was about $30 per barrel to extract those oil sand. That cost has since risen to about $50 per barrel in the past few years due to commodities price inflation (cost of steel, rubber, labor and other necessary material to "squeeze" the oil out of the sand has gone up, I had a friend who urged me to go to Canada, join him on this new oil riches a few years ago, they got paid rather well, just quite boring at times and it's up in the arctic area.)
Saudi Arabia can produce oil at a cost of pennies or a few dollars per barrel. Not every other country can be as blessed with such low production cost.