No its not. I read there is more oil under the red rocks of Utah and Nevada than there is in Saudi Arabia! What are we waiting for ? Just tear up those National Parks and erect oil derricks. And build some refineries close by ...
I think what you are talking about is the fuel we can extract from oil shale. It’s going to be a lot more expensive to produce fuel from that then it is to just pump oil out of the ground and refine it. There are all sorts of methods for extracting this stuff under consideration and all sorts of estimates about what it will cost and they all tend to be somewhere north of $30 a barrel. Startup costs will be enormous, and there are quite a bit of environmental concerns they have to deal with. I think the oil companies are afraid to go all out on this yet because they know that OPEC could just jack up production and severely undercut them on price and they’d lose their shirts. I doubt we see American oil companies going all out trying to develop these resources until they feel that OPEC nations have depleted their reserves enough that they won’t be able to really hurt them in a price war.