800 billion barrels of recoverable oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone - it could eventually rival the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.
That's a pretty big dent.
If I’ve got my numbers right, we’re importing 5B barrels annually. 800B barrels would make quite a dent for some time.
I lived not far away when they were doing the subsidized oil shale stuff back in the 70s near Rifle. The environmentalists had kittens about the ecological damage and the waste of water. Then oil prices went back down and the whole thing was just dropped.