Not So Big After All?

But still the largest found in the lower 48 and a bump up of about 15% for total U.S. reserves. It's equal to nearly one year of oil imports at current rates.

Looks like coal gasification is still going to come on at some point in the U.S. if we are to really get serious about energy independence. People forget that the U.S. coal reserves alone are estimated at roughly the equivalent of 1 TRILLION barrels of oil -- or 4 times the energy equivalent of Saudi Arabia's oil reserves.

Never mind the Canadian tar sands which are also in the ball park with the Saudis...

clipped from www.greencarcongress.com North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation of the Williston Basin, according to a just-released assessment by the US Geological Survey (USGS). This latest assessment shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency’s 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil. The assessment also identified 1.85 trillion cubic feet of associated/dissolved natural gas, and 148 million barrels of natural gas liquids. The Bakken Formation estimate is larger than all other current USGS oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest continuous oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. A continuous oil accumulation means that the oil resource is dispersed throughout a geologic formation rather than existing as discrete, localized occurrences.