Can Montana bail us out of the current oil "death spiral'?

Montana says it's found at least 4 Billions barrels of oil.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/05292008/busin...l_mi_113005.htm

They're willing to drill, and even build a refinery.

A quick Google turned this up as well:
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=16608

A Rand Corporation study says the Green River Formation, which covers parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, has the largest known oil shale deposits in the world, holding from 1.5 to 1.8 trillion barrels of crude; of that, some 800 billion barrels are recoverable with current technology -- roughly triple Saudi Arabia's current known reserves.

Some of our least populous states containing all these resources. . .sounds like a dream come true. Hopefully, the oil find won't be so much hot air, and the oil shale will be exploitable in the near future.

This would be great news. How long would it take to build a refinery?

If this is 10 years out, it doesn't help us now, but it's a start.

Atomm wrote:This would be great news. How long would it take to build a refinery?

If this is 10 years out, it doesn't help us now, but it's a start.

Yeah, I expect it would take several years to get it built. It seems like a very inconvenient place to put a refinery, except for refining all the oil found nearby. If they think they'll find enough oil to keep a refinery busy just from that, that's pretty encouraging. It's not near enough to a seaport to use for anything else.

This is the RAND study referenced (I think): http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG414.pdf

It also gets into the costs, benefits, methods and timeline of extracting oil from shale. After a (very) quick skimming of the document, the good news from my perspective is that the least environmentally damaging method also seems to be the cheapest. The bad news is that they would not expect to be able to produce significant amounts of oil from this for 12-16 years. Of course, given the "crisis" that we are seeing now, that timeline could be shorter given the proper investment.

From a resource dependence angle, it certainly would mean a much smaller interest in what happens in the middle east. I don't think that would be a bad thing either.

If we have this resource in the upper mid-west, pipelines would be the most likely method to move the oil. Rail is also a viable alternative. However, probably refineries would ideally be built near the extraction sites to minimize transport needs.

God forbid we allow our politicians to open up reserves, lift the drilling bans on public lands and drill offshore, and/or build a couple of new refineries on empty military bases.

Certainly there has to be an empty military base close to there that crude could be piped to, then processed and piped somewhere else.

F@#$, it will take 10 years just to get past the EPA, court battles with the Sierra club, and probably a billion dollars worth of environmental studies.

This is all based on futures. If the US would actually announce its going to drill like hell, open every hot oil and n. gas hot spot we know about, it would drop the prices worldwide significantly overnight.

However, what the world sees is the US just takes 25% and only gives back 5%. Far cry from when we led the world in oil production from its discovery to the early 70's.