Seems there's a change in the situation...

Rico says one Russell Tiner sends along this news, supposedly true:

About six months ago, a news program on oil had one of the Forbes brothers as the guest. The host said to Mr. Forbes: "I am going to ask you a direct question and I would like a direct answer. How much oil does the U.S. have in the ground?"
Mr. Forbes did not miss a beat. He said: "More than all the Middle East put together."
The US Geological Service issued a report in April of 2008 that only scientists and oil men knew was coming, but was it big. It was a revised report (which hadn't been updated since 1995) on how much oil was in an area of the western part of North Dakota, western South Dakota, and extreme eastern Montana.
Seems the Bakken area is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay find, and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels. Even if just ten percent of the oil is recoverable, at $107 a barrel we're looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion.
"When I first briefed legislators on this, you could see their jaws practically hit the floor. They had no idea." That from Terry Johnson, financial analyst for the Montana Legislature.
"This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years," reports The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. It's a formation known as the Williston Basin, but is more commonly referred to as the Bakken. It stretches from Northern Montana through North Dakota and into Canada. For years, U.S. oil exploration has been considered a dead end. Even the 'Big Oil' companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago. However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken's massive reserves, and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels. Because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 per barrel!
That's enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 2041 years straight.
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.

Rico says his friend the Peripatetic Engineer says the problem is that it's shale oil, and "tree huggers" don't like us digging that crap up...