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<p>Energy companies are lining up for their shot to drill in the Dakotas and Montana after a new government report revealed that a massive geological formation stretching across the states contains twice the oil and three times the amount of natural gas than was originally believed.</p>

For all the Obama-era talk of decline, there is at least one reason why America probably won't, at least not quite yet. "Peak oil" and our "oil addiction" were supposed to have ensured that we ran out of either gas or the money to buy it. Now, suddenly, we have more gas and oil than ever before. But the key question is: Why do we? The oil and gas renaissance was brought on by horizontal drilling and fracking that opened up vast new reserves either previously unknown or considered unrecoverable. Both technological breakthroughs were American discoveries, largely brought on...

To create jobs, jump-start the U.S. economy and drive more money into the nation’s treasury, President Obama should forgo tax increases in his second term and instead embrace much more domestic energy production, an oil and gas industry leader said Tuesday. “Energy access, not taxes, is the key to unlocking new revenues for our government,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, in his annual “State of American Energy” address. His speech focused heavily on recent projections that, with the right policies in place, the U.S. is poised to become the world’s leader in oil and natural gas...

The US government can create an appropriate level of energy independence by causing up to four million barrels per day of additional transportation and heating fuels to be produced from North American energy sources by auctioning long-term financial hedges (Contracts for Difference) to firms offering the best terms for building appropriate conversion facilities. An appropriate level of energy independence is one that a) greatly reduces volatility of worldwide oil markets, b) eliminates the perceived need for political and military intervention in the Middle East and other unstable regions, and c) allows sensible and transparent competition among alternate sources of basic...

As Canadian political and business leaders expressed optimism the proposed Keystone XL pipeline will win approval under a re-elected President Barack Obama, environmental opponents and the U.S. ambassador to Canada cautioned the energy megaproject isn’t a slam dunk. Obama’s Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, had vowed quick approval of the $7.6-billion pipeline if he had won Tuesday’s presidential election. But Obama, who earlier this year rejected TransCanada Corp.’s initial application because it needed more environmental review, has remained noncommital about the fate of the line, which would ship Alberta oilsands product to the U.S. Gulf Coast. In Ottawa, federal Natural Resources...

Key Findings Among the key findings in the IHS study: • Nearly $5.1 trillion in capital expenditures ($2.1 trillion in the oil sector, $3 trillion in the gas sector) will take place between 2012 and 2035 across the entire upstream unconventional oil and gas activity sectors. • Employment in the entire upstream unconventional oil and gas sector on a direct, indirect, and induced basis will support nearly 1.8 million jobs in 2012, 2.5 million jobs in 2015, 3 million jobs in 2020, and nearly 3.5 million jobs in 2035. • The jobs created tend to be high quality and high...

A new film starring Matt Damon presents American oil and natural gas producers as money-grubbing villains purportedly poisoning rural American towns. It is therefore of particular note that it is financed in part by the royal family of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. The creators of Promised Land have gone to absurd lengths to vilify oil and gas companies, as Scribe’s Michael Sandoval noted Wednesday. Since recent events have demonstrated the relative environmental soundness of hydraulic fracturing – a technique for extracting oil and gas from shale formations – Promised Land’s script has been altered to make doom-saying environmentalists the...

Although the polls show the presidential campaigns neck and neck, the facts continue to look negative for Barack Obama. Two-thirds of the American people say they believe the United States is going in the wrong direction, and changing the occupant of the White House is the only way to reverse course. Unemployment remains the prime political issue, but the Democrats still allow a tsunami of legal and illegal immigrants to take jobs away from U.S. citizens. Obama's Jobs Czar, Jeffrey Immelt, is busy creating jobs in Communist China instead of the U.S.A. Obama's wild spending is putting an albatross around...

Mitt Romney traveled to Hobbs, New Mexico yesterday to push energy independence for North America in eight years. As president, Romney would embark on energy independence by first empowering the states. Reported Yahoo! News: In what his campaign is billing as a major policy speech, Mitt Romney will unveil an energy plan Thursday that would give states the power to determine whether drilling and mining should occur on federal lands within their borders as part of a larger effort to increase domestic oil, coal and natural gas production and achieve energy independence. The Obama administration has emphasized expensive, unreliable, and...

April 22, 2012 Environmentally Sound Energy Independence Sarah Palin On this holiest of days for EcoLiberals, how about if Americans celebrate Earth Day with responsible energy development that leads to greater independence and conservation? There’s no better way for President Obama and his administration to celebrate Earth Day than to embrace a real, environmentally sound commitment to energy independence instead of relying on foreign countries that lack environmental safeguards. One aspect of the “all-of-the-above” approach I have been discussing for years involves, of course, the necessity to “drill, baby, drill.” It’s no secret that throughout America, including the very wealthy...

WASHINGTON _ The Senate on Tuesday resoundingly rejected a sweeping measure to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other protected areas to oil drilling, as well as to approve construction of the Keystone pipeline project. Tuesday's vote was the first time in four years that the Senate has voted on a measure including ANWR drilling, and it failed miserably.

Even before he was president, Barack Obama was blamed for high gas prices. In 2008, the announcer in a John McCain ad asked, “Who can you thank for rising prices at the pump?” As a photograph of Obama flashed onto the screen, a crowd chanted, “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” Now Obama is running again, prices are spiking again, and again he’s being criticized — from Valley Center to the GOP campaign trail. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney says Obama was partially to blame for the rising prices because he slowed down licensing and permitting processes for offshore and onshore drilling. Former House...

Bet you’ll never guess which country is the world’s largest holder of natural gas, oil and coal resources combined. That’s right. This country. According to a report released today by the Institute for Energy Research, the United States has 1.4 trillion barrels of recoverable reserves of oil — or more than the entire world has used in 150 years. That’s enough to fuel the United States for the next 250 years. Add natural gas and coal resources to that and we’re good to go for all the foreseeable future. But, thanks to backward energy policies, we’re still dependent on foreign...

The American phoenix is slowly rising again. Within five years or so, the US will be well on its way to self-sufficiency in fuel and energy. Manufacturing will have closed the labour gap with China in a clutch of key industries. The current account might even be in surplus.

Gov. Rick Perry has released a jobs plan. Or is it an energy plan? Or it is an EPA-reform plan? Or is it a trade-deficit plan? The plan is a bit of each, and it is a very good one. Governor Perry, under whom Texas enjoyed the strongest job-creation record of any large U.S. state, proposes to open up oil and gas production in areas in which American producers are either shut out or heavily restricted: the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida coast, and Alaska, among others. Perry’s plan also entails the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline and the...

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) —The Obama administration is taking steps to extend new federal protections to a list of imperiled animals and plants that reads like a manifest for Noah's Ark —from the melodic golden-winged warbler and slow-moving gopher tortoise, to the slimy American eel and tiny.. rat. ...With a Friday deadline to act on more than 700 pending cases, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service already has issued decisions advancing more than 500 species toward potential new protections under the Endangered Species Act.

A U.S. company says it is getting closer to putting prototype electric cars on the road that will be powered by the heavy-metal thorium (Steam Electric 250MW)... with prototype in two years....never needs refueled.

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin spoke to a crowd of over 4,000 at Tyler's Oil Palace in Texas. American energy policy, the BP oil spill, the federal response to the disaster and job creation dominated Mrs. Palin's speech. Here is highlights of the rousing speech

Herman Cain discusses his views on Obama, Libya, Energy Independence, Brazil's Oil, Israel, Muslims in the government and more...

There's been a lot of discussion about energy policy on Right Speak over the past 2 days. Since this will be a defining issue in the upcoming campaign, it's certainly a worthy topic. Earlier today, my good friend Doug produced a brilliantly written piece highlighting Mitt Romney's views on energy, referencing Romney's book, No Apology. While I didn't find much to disagree with in Doug's post, I thought it would be fair to briefly highlight Sarah Palin's experience with energy, and provide a reference for our readers to research her positions. Prior to being elected Governor of a state which...

This week's uprising in Egypt that occurred in concert with a minor spike in the price of oil unsurprisingly led to renewed commentary suggesting the U.S. must achieve "energy independence." A USA Today editorial noted that "More than half the oil Americans use is imported - a vulnerability exposed by the ongoing tumult in Egypt", while noted energy scold T. Boone Pickens decried our continued "exposure" to overseas events that allegedly reward us with higher oil prices. But looked at with a more reasoned eye, the events in Egypt exposed the sheer absurdity of the charitably false notion of energy...

From the video caption: Seven false green energy job 'myths' are debunked. This video was produced by http:rev-up.org -- a site that provides teachers and students all the resources they might need for renewable energy education.

Looking good is what Avon is all about, so it's not surprising that a cosmetics giant with annual revenues of $10 billion is concerned about its image. That, after all, is the motive behind Avon's boycott of fuel derived from Alberta's oil sands -- looking good. Never mind that oil banned from Alberta -- the most regulated and transparently sourced oil on the planet -- will have to be replaced by oil from some despotic regime but, hey, maybe you can put lipstick on a pig. "Avon recognizes its responsibility to the environment and the world's forests," said Tod Abreast,...

ITHACA-- The future of Marcellus Shale hydraulic fracturing in New York faces more push-back from local politicians. Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) was in Ithaca Wednesday to sign a letter asking Gov. Paterson to withdraw the draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) the state Department of Environmental Conservation released last year. Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, wrote the letter last year. Former congressman Eric Massa and Rep. Mike Arcuri's names are also on that petition.

Recovery: While states like Nevada wallow in recession, tiny North Dakota becomes the first state rated as expanding by a leading service. Could it be the state's burgeoning energy industry? The recession — induced by Democrats and activists meddling in the housing market through the Community Reinvestment Act and then whistling past the bad-loan graveyard of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — officially ended in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. For much of the country, mired in a jobless recovery with job losses so great and prospects so bleak that it will take decades just...

"It has been a matter of policy in the wind farm industry to make the financing of it both opaque and complicated," said Mr Etherington. "In all countries across Europe the customer is not told how much they are paying for it, and the whole financing of the industry is coming out of subsidy on electricity generation." .....Recent research by Kroll, the international corporate security firm, has discovered examples all over Europe of so-called "clean energy" schemes being used to to line criminals' pockets rather than save the planet. Some involve windmills that stand derelict or are simply never built,...

In the 1980′s I altered the words of a pop song to describe how I felt about our economy and my personal future: The future is so bright I have to wear welding goggles. (For most of you who don’t know about manufacturing, welding goggles filter out almost all light – arc welding is like staring into the sun.) I don’t know anyone who feels this way anymore. America is lost. We are stagnant. There is no really big thing coming along in technology that will save the day, although there are millions of incremental improvements that are improving the...

The Finnish Parliament approved the construction of two nuclear power plants on Thursday, the latest victory for proponents of atomic energy in Europe. Just two weeks ago, the Swedish Parliament narrowly voted to allow the reactors at 10 nuclear power plants to be replaced when the old ones are shut down — a reversal from a 1980 referendum that called for them to be phased out entirely. The vote will allow the Finns to build their sixth and seventh nuclear plants. The country’s four existing nuclear plants provide about 28 percent of Finland’s total electricity needs, according to the World...

Energy Policy: The advisory board on offshore drilling says it never endorsed a moratorium, which was added later by the interior secretary. The only thing transparent about this administration is its lies. Experts brought together by the Obama administration to review offshore drilling safety were asked to review recommendations in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. They did not give their blessing to the six-month drilling moratorium announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and have accused him of deliberately appending their report to make it seem like they did. According to the New Orleans Times Picayune, Salazar's May 27...

Deja Vu: In a Carteresque speech Wednesday, the president said we should tax our way out of despondency and dependence on fossil fuels. The American dream isn't slipping away. It's being stolen by big government. It might as well have been President Carter addressing the audience of students and faculty at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. Instead it was President Obama who spoke of our dependence on fossil fuels and blamed everybody and everything, except for a lack of presidential leadership, for our current situation. On July 15, 1979, President James Earl Carter gave what has become known as the "malaise"...

Energy: An administration never enthusiastic about offshore drilling is using the Gulf oil spill as an excuse to suspend Arctic exploration. Who could've seen that coming? Now we'll be more dependent on foreign oil. Suspicions in some quarters that the administration was being deliberately lax in its response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in order to pursue a larger, anti-domestic energy agenda were met with derision. But if not deliberate, the effect is the same as the administration prepares to shut down our search for new oil. President Obama on Thursday announced a suspension...

The BP Spill: Tuesday on Capitol Hill, oil executives were subjected to the Senate's latest show trial. Senators did not say the accident in federal waters was a federal responsibility or that nature spills more oil every day. The morning hearing by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee chaired by Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and the afternoon session before California Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environmental and Public Works Committee prove White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's dictum that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste — especially when your goal is exploiting the Deepwater Horizon disaster...

Energy: The administration has banned new offshore drilling until the Gulf oil spill is investigated. Was its heart in it anyway? It seems environmental concerns apply only to certain forms of energy. No one pays much attention to the aquatic "dead zones" that have appeared off our shores at the mouths of our rivers due to agricultural runoff created by mandates for corn-based ethanol. Ethanol is green energy, good energy — never mind that such biofuels drive up food prices, increase hunger around the world and damage the environment in their own way. The explosion that blew apart an oil...

Energy: As the administration loosens restrictions on domestic energy development and offshore drilling, a reviled company develops technology to unlock America's vast shale resources. Drill, baby, drill. We have been among President Obama's harshest critics when it comes to the administration's overly restrictive energy policy, so we were pleasantly surprised to see him announce on Wednesday some light at the end of the pipeline. Some light, for many restrictions will remain in an energy policy best termed schizophrenic. Speaking at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., Obama announced the welcome news that his administration will let lease sales go...

Future Fuels: Our secretary of energy pushes bio-refineries and windmills to oil executives at an energy conference as the administration announces a three-year offshore drilling ban. This is a policy for economic suicide. They don't qualify as an official group of victims, but carbon-Americans, as they have been called, did not have much to cheer about last week, when Energy Secretary Steven Chu addressed CERAWeek 2010, a premier industry conference hosted by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. With an economy struggling to regain sound footing, Chu advocated a starvation diet devoid of additional fossil fuels that are to remain under...

A new technique being used to drill through a type of rock known as shale has led to a surge in domestic natural gas production over the last three years and enabled the United States to overtake Russia recently as the world's No. 1 producer of natural gas. As a result, we are seeing a remarkable turnabout in energy geopolitics: as U.S. natural gas reserves have soared thanks to advanced drilling methods, Russia's goal of establishing a world gas cartel patterned on OPEC has collapsed. How big of a development is this? Think back to 2003, when America's demand for...

On a party-line vote, the Democratically-controlled state Senate killed a bill tied to Gov. Robert McDonnell’s (R) plans for offshore oil and natural gas exploration. Twenty-two Democrats — including all senators from Arlington County, City of Alexandria and Fairfax County — voted down a bill that would have designated 80 percent of revenue and royalties produced by drilling off the shore of Virginia for the commonwealth’s transportation trust fund. All 18 Republicans supported the measure. While on the campaign trial this past fall, McDonnell had promoted drilling for oil and natural gas off the shore of Virginia Beach, saying, among...

Energy: A new study shows that our reluctance to develop domestic energy will cost the beleaguered U.S. economy trillions in opportunity costs, reduce our gross domestic product and increase our trade deficit. From trying to stimulate jobs in nonexistent ZIP codes at great expense to worshiping the false gods of climate change, our biggest deficit these days may be in the area of common sense. A new study shows that many of our wounds are self-inflicted as we forgo the wealth and jobs to be found in our waters and under our feet. The study by Science Applications International Corp....

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama next week will announce a loan guarantee to build the first nuclear power plant in the United States in almost three decades, an administration official said Friday. The two new Southern Co. reactors to be built in Burke, Ga., are part of a White House energy plan administration officials hope will draw Republican support. Obama's direct involvement in announcing the award underscores the political weight the White House is putting behind its effort to use nuclear power and alternative energy sources to lessen American dependence on foreign oil and reduce the use of other fossil...

Energy: When even Chuck Schumer is upset with the White House, you know something's amiss. In this case, it's news that efforts to boost wind power with taxpayer stimulus dollars are filling foreign coffers and creating foreign jobs. According to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Investment Act has been spent on wind power. The goal was to further energy independence while creating American jobs. It has done neither. Of the money spent, according to the report, nearly 80% has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines. "In all...

Absolutely...The funniest joke ever... AND IT’S ON US ! Let it sink in. Quietly... we go like sheep to slaughter. Does anybody out there have any memory Of the reason given for the establishment Of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY During the Carter Administration? Anybody? Anything? No? Didn't think so! Bottom line ... We've spent several hundred billion dollars In support of an agency ...the reason For which not one person who reads This can remember. Ready??????? It was very simple .. And at the time everybody thought It very appropriate... The 'Department of Energy' Was instituted on 8-04-1977 TO LESSEN...

Energy The administration asked for public comments on a plan to expand offshore drilling. When they came in 2-to-1 in favor, the Interior Department sat on the news. Time for a "Texas tea" party? When you ask for public comment on a major policy issue, at some point you should make the results public, not hide them until you can figure out a way to spin the public reaction to support a conclusion you've already drawn. On its last business day in office, the Bush administration published a proposed draft of a five-year plan to lease areas in the Atlantic...

This is a video of a panel discussion at the Herzliya Conference in Israel which informed that the US can be oil energy independent in 10 years. Really fascinating.

In testimony delivered in Houston today, officials with the American Petroleum Institute said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed new ozone pollution standards would exact significant costs on consumers, jobs and the economy without delivering commensurate benefits. Furthermore, they said there was no solid scientific justification for imposing the more stringent standards.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Virginia's two U.S. senators on Wednesday urged the Obama administration to carry out a previous plan to lease almost 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) in federal waters off the state's coastline to oil and natural gas companies. The lawmakers said in a letter to U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar that recent comments by a department official that the Virginia lease sale originally planned for late 2011 would be delayed until 2012 at the earliest are frustrating given that drilling creates jobs and needed energy supplies. The offshore Virginia area that would be leased may hold 130...

Americans are adopting a failed type of clean energy subsidy—the feed-in tariff—just as Europeans are abandoning it. “How can California encourage investors to generate renewable electricity? How about a guarantee that if they generate the power, they'll be paid at a good price?” suggests Ray Pingle of the Sierra Club. Fair enough. But the price proposed by the Sierra Club and some members of Congress is three to five times more than the current average price of electricity. Green power advocates in the United States have started pushing for a European-style subsidy scheme in which homeowners or businesses that install...

Energy: The government says wind power could supply the eastern half of the U.S. with a fifth of its electricity by 2024. Just don't try building wind farms where someone might see them. A claim is contained in a new study released by the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and technically it might be true. But we've heard these overblown predictions before, and experience around the world with heavily subsidized alternative energy has not worked out well. The area in question, called the Eastern Interconnection, is a grid extending roughly from the western borders of the Plains states through...

Despite the Facts, Democrats, Republicans, and the Neoconservatives Continue To Hype Energy Autarky When talking about energy, facts should matter. Alas, when it comes to promoting the myth of “energy independence” politicians and political operatives on both the Left and the Right are not interested in facts or reality. Their only interest is in playing to the crowd and in trying to stir emotional responses. That’s a somewhat painful conclusion. For the past two years, and particularly since the publication of my book, Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence,” which came out in April 2008, I have...

January 13, 2010, 4:00 a.m. American Energy Independence A war-fighting necessity or “‘foreign oil’ alarmism”? By Barbara Lerner Is energy a key element in the war we are fighting against the onslaught of Islamist terror and subversion? Does America need energy independence to really win this war? The American people seem to think so. The last time a Rasmussen poll asked them if the development of new homegrown energy sources was “an urgent national priority,� 81 percent said yes. Only 9 percent disagreed. In NRO last month, I argued that the great American majority is right, on this fundamental...

nterior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Wednesday that big oil and natural gas companies will no longer be "the kings of the world" like they were under the Bush administration, announcing new drilling policies to protect the environment on western federal lands. While the reforms would likely slow the permitting process to search for oil and gas on government lands and decrease the number of acres available for energy exploration, Salazar rejected industry claims that the Obama administration's policy change would reduce domestic energy supplies. "The difference is in the prior administration the oil and gas industry essentially were the...