The analyst with the direst concern says the reserves will be of no help. Nor, apparently, would oil tar or oil shale recovery. His pessimism is based on the likelihood oil refineries outside of New Orleans will be out of commission for quite some time. There will be no or few plants available to refine the crude.
I think people are forgetting that the USA has massive reserves of coal from the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Appalacian Mountains--all of which can be converted to petroleum products through coal liquification.
Worse than forgetting. Unaware.
What would be required to quickly convert and distribute enough coal-extracted oil sufficient to replace lost refining capacity? How quickly might it be done? Would the liquefied oil require further refining?
Actually, many oil refineries in Texas could be quickly converted (if we go on a crash program) to use a coal liquification process originally developed by the Germans and used by the South Africans extensively. It's not a cheap process but at current oil prices it's already substantially profitable to do so. Besides, a lot of supposedly useless coal mines could suddenly become useful again, since the coal instead of being burned directly to run powerplant boilers will be shipped to modified refineries to be turned into petroleum products. Indeed, coal in many ways can almost be described as "solidified crude oil."
I'm sure people will ask the question of how do we ship all that coal to coal liquification plants in most likely in Texas? Fortunately, our freight railroad system is probably the best on Earth, and as such we have the railway lines that can connect major coal fields in Wyoming, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, West Virginia, etc. to the Texas plants. Indeed, coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming are already being shipped all over the eastern half of the USA (including a lot to Texas), so infrastructure upgrades won't be exorbitantly expensive.