A certain email which has become somewhat infamous in recent months concerns a huge oil deposit that was discovered 2 years ago here in the United States. This massive oil discovery is so big that it could possibly eliminate America's need for foreign oil for a very long time. The Bakken Formation located in the western 2/3 of North Dakota; western South Dakota; and extreme eastern Montana is said to contain an amazing 2 trillion barrels of oil.

This particular email makes the claim that there is enough oil in the Bakken Formation to supply the United States with 41 years worth of oil at a scant price of just $16 per barrel, and this news is raising the hopes of many Americans who are suffering great pain at the pump in a terribly depressed economy. With such fantastic news, many are asking why this story has not made front page or headline news, and why we’re not busy extracting this oil on a much larger scale in order to relieve this nation’s economy and put an end to the war for control of oil in the Middle East.

Evidently there is a political tone to this widespread email, as one provocative statement is quoted here: “HOW can we NOT BE extracting this!? Because the democrats, environmentalists and left wing republicans have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil.”

The email message directly implies that OPEC is funding the American environmentalists, and that U.S. citizens should be angry about it enough to spread the word to everybody they know, and to push their local legislators to “Drill Baby, Drill.”

The USGS confirms the existence of the Bakken Formation on their website (http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911), and in the Frequently Asked Questions section issued this statement: “The estimate of technically recoverable oil in the Bakken Formation 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.”

However, the key words to this statement are: “technically recoverable oil.” There are many estimates as to how much total oil is in that region. More information can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakken_Formation

The particular email that is circulating states the following:

“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”

But even if ALL these statements are true, the only amount of oil that really matters is that which can be recovered with modern day technology. At the end of said email message, readers were encouraged to verify all statements made therein with a Google word search and the website link to the USGS was provided. Based on this invitation, this reporter concludes with the following information.

Due to the type of rock formations that the oil is deposited in, and considering the great degree of difficulty and cost involved to extract such oil, the U.S. Geological Service estimates that there is between 3.0 billion and 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil, or a mean value of 3.65 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Bakken region.

According to SNOPES, the U.S. currently imports approximately 3.65 billion barrels of oil per year or 1 million barrels per day. (http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/bakken.asp) At this rate of consumption, if the entire total recoverable amount of oil in the Bakken region was extracted today, it would only meet America's import need for 1 year. The Bakken Formation is most certainly not a 41 year supply of oil as touted by that particular email message.

In 2007, the Energy Information Administration estimated that approximately 7,548 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products were consumed in the United States, which is slightly more than double the consumption of the SNOPES report. (http://www.eia.doe.gov/) That rate of consumption 2 years ago would exhaust the total recoverable amount of oil in the Bakken Formation in just less than 6 months.

As oil recovery techniques continue to progress, perhaps in the near future the technically recoverable amount of oil in the Bakken Formation will increase to a point where it can be a very cost effective and substantial benefit to the American people. But to date, all the hype of a miracle oil boom appears to be very premature and nothing but propaganda.

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