[Ben Ficklin]

First you have your oil and sometimes oil can be heavy and viscous. Then you have your bitumen, sometimes called tar, which is produced in Alberta Tar Sands. It is so viscous that it has to be diluted before it can be shipped, which is called diluted bitumen or dilbit. For example ship the light crude produced in the Bakken to Alberta to dilute the Alberta Tar oil into dilbit so that it can shipped down the Keystone pipeline.

Then you have your kerogen found in the Greenriver formation in the US west, Israel/Palestine, east europe, and Mongolia. This can be "cooked" into oil and then transported by conventional methods.

[mountainlion]

The USA has more carbon based energy than anywhere else in the world. When you drive in the oil shale areas of Colorado you can see oil seeping out of layers of rocks. Before fracking The Denver post had an article on drilling wells and removing oil by heat for about $35 a barrel. Now with fracking and horizontal drilling and other new techniques it could be at least as cheap except for the EPA and anti oil government policies. I don’t remember the figures but it seemed to be 36B barrels of oil.