North Dakota — the next Saudi Arabia

“I think the peak oil folks got it wrong. As usual. Capitalism beats the fear mongers. Again.”

So says a post at the blog Classical Values (“End the culture war by restoring classical values”), passed on to me by a reader. The catalyst for this dismissal of peak oil anxieties? News of the imminent release of a federal report estimating the recoverable oil in the Bakken shale formation, a geological structure that spreads across North Dakota, Montana and parts of Canada.

Guesses as to the total amount of oil in the Bakken shale formation range from 10 billion barrels to an eye-opening 500 billion. Estimates of the amount of commercially feasible recoverable oil from Bakken are equally across the board, from 1 percent to 50 percent.

If 50 percent of 500 billion barrels of oil could be recovered in a reasonably short time frame, that might make a difference to the dynamics of global oil supply and demand. But such a prospect is unlikely. Shale oil is defined as sedimentary rock from which liquid hydrocarbons can be extracted. But it is not easy, and it is not cheap (and let’s not even think of how environmentally catastrophic it is to pulverize mountains of rocks to get barrels of oil).

Salon.com