Free Republic

The United States’ strategic oil reserves fell to a 37-year low as President Joe Biden continues to release millions of barrels of oil and put them up for sale, with most going overseas. According to the latest report from the Department of Energy, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) fell to 453.1 million barrels as of Aug. 19. This is the lowest level the SPR has been since Jan. 1985. Stockpiles have fallen by more than 180 million barrels this year as the Biden administration ordered the release of record amounts of crude oil, supposedly to cool sky-high inflation and...

It's no secret that North Dakota has been in the middle of an oil boom since about 2008, but a new chart from the North Dakota Industrial Commission, Department of Mineral Resources, shows just how steep the increase has been. As of 2006, the state was only producing about 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day, putting it on par with other mid-tier oil producing states like Kansas, Colorado and Montana. But new hydraulic fracturing techniques and the opening of the massive Bakken formation to drilling changed all that, and as of January 2013 the state was producing an average...

The elephants aren't extinct yet. Chevron Corp. and its partners say they have tapped into an area that may contain as much as 15 billion barrels of oil in the ultradeep waters of the Gulf of Mexico — the kind of massive reservoir of crude that the industry dubs an elephant discovery. The days of such discoveries were supposedly gone, with oil supplies peaking as the world simply ran out of big oil-producing fields, according to pessimistic forecasters. Instead, high technology and sky-high oil prices have combined to transform dud prospects into billions of barrels of crude. “The industry is...