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It’s America’s final frontier for shale. And the payout will be huge. Get this… If you add up the recoverable resource estimate for the oft-mentioned Bakken formation in North Dakota, as well as the Eagle Ford in South Texas… then DOUBLE it, you’ll get close to the number of recoverable barrels of oil that remain trapped in the heart of this untapped “mega” shale deposit. Put another way, according to the US Energy Information Administration, this one massive shale play represents 64% of the total recoverable shale oil resource base in the country. It’s the big kahuna, and today we’ll...

North America has become the fastest growing oil and gas region in the world. Production of shale oil and gas and oil sands resources are increasing year after year as new infrastructures are developed, new extraction technologies are used and more resources are found. The surging supply growth could change North America into the new Middle East by 2020 according to a GPS report produced by Citigroup (NYSE: C). If accurate, the energy industry would generate benefits from exploitation of oil and ensure endless economic wealth for the country. As a matter of fact, crude oil is off its all-time...

Global shale oil production has the potential to reach up to 14 million barrels per day by 2035, or 12 percent of the world’s total oil supply, according to a new report from accountants PwC released Thursday. PwC’s report – 'Shale oil: the next energy revolution' – stated that the firm estimates the increase could reduce oil prices in 2035 to between 25 percent and 40 percent (or between $83 and $100 per barrel in real terms) relative to the current baseline EIA projection of $133 per barrel in 2035. The firm said that the potential emergence of shale oil...

Shale energy exploration, the growing practice of deep horizontal drilling to harvest oil and natural gas previously beyond reach, has changed America’s energy industry and overall economy. The fact that natural gas prices are at a ten-year-low is a strong indicator of this positive change. And in the areas where the actual drilling occurs– Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Louisiana and North Dakota– there are even more direct economic impacts of what has been called the “shale boom.” Benesch, an Ohio based firm with expertise in transportation law, recently collaborated with National Tank Truck Carriers in Washington, D.C. and the Ohio Trucking...

The US shale boom has led some to predict that it will overtake Saudi Arabia as world’s largest oil and gas producer by 2020, thanks to the massive reserves found in plays such as the Bakken Shale of North Dakota, the Marcellus Shale in New York, and the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas; even the newly discovered Tuscaloosa Shale formation in Louisiana holds large potential. However there is a new shale formation that has been discovered in West Texas which could dwarf all others being drilled in the US at the moment. The play is known as the Cline Shale...

Shale Oil Bonanza Reaches Australia With '$20 Trillion' Discovery Adam TaylorJanuary 23, 2013, 6:51 PMCoober Pedy, a town near the Arckaringa Basin A Brisbane-based company, Linc Energy, today released two reports that suggest huge figures in potential shale oil reserves located in South Australia, the Herald Sun reports. The estimates of oil reserves in the Arckaringa Basin range from 3.5 billion to 233 billion barrels of oil — potentially worth as much as $20 trillion. "If it comes in the way the reports are suggesting, it could well and truly bring Australia back to (oil) self-sufficiency," Linc managing director Peter...

SNYDER, Texas - Snyder is a small city of just 11,000 people, but the recent oil boom has put it on the map. "You've gone from being the unknown sleepy little town in West Texas to we've got the bullseye on our back," said Bill Lavers, Executive Director of the Development Corporation of Snyder. Snyder hasn't seen growth like this in decades. With the discovery of the Cline Shale oil area, people and businesses are flocking to the area. "It appears that it's going to be one of the larger growth areas and booms that we've had in Snyder for...

“Promised Land,” the anti-fracking film written and produced by Hollywood stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski, was made in part by a production company owned by the government of Arab oil emirate Abu Dhabi – a state in direct competition with American oil and gas producers. The film is financed in part by Image Nation Abu Dhabi, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media which is owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, one of 13 Arab emirates that makes up the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and serves as that country’s capitol.Abu Dhabi media was created by the Abu Dhabi government...

After horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing cracked open the Bakken formation and exposed hundreds of barrels of oil per day, the appeal of oil is growing across the country. South Dakota is one state that believes it may have an oil formation, so a state geologist is trying to attract companies to travel south. South Dakota wants more than four famous faces. The state geologist believes they may have undiscovered oil. "We are looking at the old historic data and were seeing these reports of tight formations that had oil in them, but they blew them off as not being...

A word of warning: It’s impossible to review Promised Land, the new movie written by Matt Damon and John Krasinski and directed by Gus Van Sant, without giving away its twist ending. Though the plot turn is fumbling in its execution, it is the slyest tactic in the movie’s clumsy crusade against fracking, the process of injecting high-pressure chemicals, water, and sand into the ground to access vast quantities of otherwise inaccessible natural gas.Here’s the premise: Steve Butler (Damon) is a corporate salesman who draws on his rural roots to persuade farmers to sell their land to a fracking...

Energy: As the U.S. changes the balance of power by exporting some of its abundant natural gas resources, a Hollywood propaganda film debuts claiming the technology making it possible will poison America's small towns. 'Promised Land," a film that does nothing to alter Hollywood's stereotype of businessmen, particularly energy industry executives, as greedy plunderers of the planet, opens this week in selected theatres. The anti-fracking film is based on a not-true story about well contamination in a small Pennsylvania town with a healthy dose of junk science. As documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who is working on his own documentary, "FrackNation",...

Now that the election is over, nine Republican and nine Democrats have asked the president to stop making excuses and build a job-creating pipeline that will close the revenue gap through economic growth. The truly bipartisan group of senators, led by Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and powerful chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican, wrote President Obama on Friday urging him to quickly issue a permit for the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring over 830,000 barrels of crude from Canada's oil sands to American refineries every day. "Setting...

Think about how a new IEA projection – that our vast shale resources will let the U.S. overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world’s largest oil producer by 2020 – fits with last week’s decision by the administration to remove more than 1.5 million western acres from oil shale development. Short answer: Not very well. Although we’re talking about two different shale resources – one that yields oil and/or natural gas when fractured and one containing solid material that converts to liquid oil when heated – this is about two approaches to America’s energy future and what’s possible if...

In the final days of the election I made what turned out to be a clearly futile effort to demonstrate that the future of energy production, as well as the associated jobs and economic boost which go with it, could be significantly affected by the outcome. One candidate had a substantially pro-energy policy which included completing the Keystone pipeline and unshackling promising areas of domestic energy development. The other did not. Taking a line from Bruce Willis for a moment... I hate it when I'm right. The Interior Department on Friday issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres...

Energy Policy: Leases and production are down on federal lands, the EPA is waging war on coal, and as for building enough pipelines to encircle the earth, we'd settle for just one from Canada to the Gulf. When President Obama, in responding Tuesday to Mitt Romney's chiding about failing to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, claimed that his administration has added enough new oil and gas pipelines to "encircle the Earth and then some," we felt a perfect response from Romney would have been, "You didn't build that." In fact, energy companies have built some 55,000 miles of pipeline, including...

Energy Policy: Leases and production are down on federal lands, the EPA is waging war on coal, and as for building enough pipelines to encircle the earth, we'd settle for just one from Canada to the Gulf. When President Obama, in responding Tuesday to Mitt Romney's chiding about failing to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, claimed that his administration has added enough new oil and gas pipelines to "encircle the Earth and then some," we felt a perfect response from Romney would have been, "You didn't build that." In fact, energy companies have built some 55,000 miles of pipeline, including...

This is a tale of two cities. No, not Dickens' phlegmatic London and passionate Paris. Nor the two neighborhoods Charles Murray contrasted in his recent bestseller "Coming Apart" -- prosperous but isolated Belmont (actually, Mitt Romney's home for decades) and needy and disorganized Fishtown. These two cities have names you may not recognize but which you have probably read about in the last few years: Fremont and Williston. Fremont, Calif., is the southernmost city in California's East Bay, just around the corner from (well, a few freeway exits away from) Silicon Valley. It's not as upscale as Palo Alto or...

Forget peak oil; forget the Middle East. The energy revolution of the 21st century isn’t about solar energy or wind power and the “scramble for oil” isn’t going to drive global politics. The energy abundance that helped propel the United States to global leadership in the 19th and 2oth centuries is back; if the energy revolution now taking shape lives up to its full potential, we are headed into a new century in which the location of the world’s energy resources and the structure of the world’s energy trade support American affluence at home and power abroad. By some estimates,...

A new age of abundance for fossil fuels is upon us. And the center of gravity of the global energy picture is shifting from the Middle East to… North America.

The tectonic plates of Middle East politics are shifting fast. Egypt’s Arab spring may have run into the sand of anti-democratic Islamism, but the days when oil-rich Arab sheikhs colluded to hold Western economies to ransom will soon end. Massive shale oil and gas discoveries across the West, Israel’s rising status as a Middle East energy powerhouse and a deepening internal rift over strategic policy are all colluding to hasten OPEC’s demise. In June, Kuwaiti oil minister Hani Hussein’s commented, “Oil from the Middle East will always find a home. And we have to see more research to get a...