It would be nice if they were in play. The USGS report from April 2008 seems to contradict the 1999 estimate you refer to.
OK, so I guess we don’t try at all. There is *no* oil around the continental and even extra-continental US that we can conceivably go after, even though we haven’t looked for it for 30 years in some places...I am not buying that porposition. I think there are waaay more than 3-4 billion barrels in Bakken, and even the Chinese realize that there is oil in the Caribbean, yet we choose not to pursue it, regardless of how ‘pretty the rigs are at night’...;-))
I think the newest USGS report from April 2008 seems to contradict the 1999 report because of the advancement of technology. In 1990, there was “no oil” on our place, but today there is a little. Technology has advanced so much more than we had in 1990.