This guy's opinion piece is void of any homework. The Bakken oil shale field was discovered in 1953, so why has it been mostly untouched? Use some common sense. It's not like one can poke a straw in the ground and have the oil gushing like that have for years in Saudi Arabia. If that were the case, Americans would be building man-made islands and gold structures, too. I love how he blames environmentalists for this. *shakes head*
This is the reality, all explaining for you with credible sources.
"What about the Bakken Oil Shale? I heard it's absolutely huge."
The Bakken oil shale field was discovered in 1953. In spring of 2008, a series of breathless reports regarding the Bakken shale began circulating the internet. Even if the reports are true, the 4.3 billion barrels supposedly contained within it will push the global peak back by only 2.15 billion barrels. That amounts to about one month's worth of at current levels of global demand.
The reality is the Bakken "oil find" is not even actual oil, it is shale rock buried 9,000 feet underground that has a tiny amount of oil in it that might someday be extracted with extraordinary cost. An article in the Toronto Star explains:
Assuming all 4.3 billion barrels could be retrieved, it would represent nine months of oil consumption in the United States. Now, let's consider the nature of the Bakken oil. It doesn't sit in big underground pools where you can just pop in a metal straw and suck it out. This oil is trapped in layers of shale – a sedimentary rock – up to 3,000 metres deep. It will cost dearly to go after Bakken oil, just as Chevron will have to pay a bundle if it hopes to extract the 3 to 15 billion barrels it has discovered in the Gulf of Mexico, kilometres under the water at its "Jack" wells. The technology exists to get it – at least some of it. We can also have a manned mission to Mars if we truly wanted to pay for it. Source
If everything breaks just right, the Bakken oil shale might produce a maximimum of a few hundred thousand barrels per day albeit at great cost. Oil industry analyst Dave Cohen explains further:
If other parts of the Middle Bakken are as productive as the drilled parts of Elm Coulee, and constant large investment in drilling activity in the western Williston Basin continues, we might see peak production somewhere in excess of 100,000 barrels per day. This is an educated guess, but this estimate is not off by an order of magnitude, i.e. we are talking about peak production rates in the very low hundreds of thousands, not millions, of barrels of oil per day. Source
An extensive independent analysis posted at the peer-reviewed oil industry site The Oil Drum came to similar conclusions regarding the potential of the Bakken Shale:
The Bakken shale has produced about 111 million barrels of oil during the last 50+ years in Montana and North Dakota. Total Bakken production is still rising, and producing at the rate of 75,000 BPD in October 2007. Because of the highly variable nature of shale reservoirs, the characteristics of the historical Bakken production, and the fact that per-well rates seem to have peaked, it seems unlikely that total Bakken production will exceed 2x to 3x current rate of 75,000 BPD. Source
This will, of course, make some money for the companies producing the oil but given the fact global supply will be dropping by 2.5 million barrels per day (or more) per year once the decline really gets under way, a couple hundred thousand barrels per day won't make much difference to the overall market.
To put 200,000 barrels a day in perspective, consider the fact the world now uses 1,000 barrels per second. Source What this means is that even in the most opitmistic scenario the Bakken oil shale might provide the world with about 200 seconds - or just over 3 minutes - of additional oil per day. That commentators such as Jerorme Corsi have hailed it as a "bonanza" and "proof that oil supplies are nowhere near peaking" (Source) should tell you more about their motives than anything else.
Peak Oil, Matt Savinar, Life After the Oil Crash