[clue-talk] oil...

[Angelo Bertolli]

Nate Duehr wrote:
> I thought this was interesting.  Someone forwarded it to me this morning.
>
> http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
>
> While I know it's politically incorrect to even talk about burning 
> petroleum these days (while "clean" coal burning doesn't seem to 
> bother anyone), I thought it was cool that USGS says they found this 
> in the Dakotas and Montana:
>
> "The Bakken Formation estimate is larger than all other current USGS 
> oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest "continuous" 
> oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. A "continuous" oil 
> accumulation means that the oil resource is dispersed throughout a 
> geologic formation rather than existing as discrete, localized 
> occurrences. The next largest "continuous" oil accumulation in the 
> U.S. is in the Austin Chalk of Texas and Louisiana, with an 
> undiscovered estimate of 1.0 billions of barrels of technically 
> recoverable oil."
>
> Drilling may not fix anything long-term, but we're not exactly 
> resource-poor here.

Let's see, if I were an oil company... I'd hold some drilling 
opportunities "for a rainy day."  The oil companies definitely want to 
"cash-in" when there's a crisis one day.  I'm not against drilling for 
more oil here, but I am against just letting companies do whatever they 
want.  If they want us to open up more land for them, they need to have 
some obligation to use it for the benefit of the country and not solely 
to maximize their profits.  If not, I say start a public drilling program.

-- 
Angelo Bertolli
http://angelo.bitfreedom.com/

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