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When you include oil shale, the U.S. has 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable oil, according to the Institute for Energy Research, enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for about the next 200 years, without any imports.

Oil spill commission reuniting to press for drilling reformsBy Andrew Restuccia - 03/14/12 10:47 AM ET Members of the national oil spill commission are reuniting to monitor the federal government’s progress in implementing a series of drilling safety recommendations put forward by the panel last year. The seven-member commission, which was tasked by President Obama with investigating the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, is forming what it calls “Oil Spill Commission Action.” The new group will issue a report in April assessing government and industry efforts to enhance safety and environmental standards in the aftermath of the spill, which...

When he was running for the Oval Office four years ago amid $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, then-Sen. Barack Obama dismissed the idea of expanded oil production as a way to relieve the pain at the pump. "Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling," he said. "America still has only 3% of the world's oil reserves." Which meant, he said, that the U.S. couldn't affect global oil prices....But the figure Obama uses — proved oil reserves — vastly undercounts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the...

WASHINGTON _ The Senate on Tuesday resoundingly rejected a sweeping measure to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other protected areas to oil drilling, as well as to approve construction of the Keystone pipeline project. Tuesday's vote was the first time in four years that the Senate has voted on a measure including ANWR drilling, and it failed miserably.

Energy: At a plant that makes natural-gas-powered trucks, the president proposes still more alternative-energy subsidies. The privately developed technology that lowered the price of natural gas can lower gasoline prices too. It was a tad surreal to see President Obama, champion of green energy and unions, visiting a foreign-owned manufacturer of natural gas-powered trucks in a right-to-work state. But there he was Wednesday, at the Daimler Trucks North America truck factory in Mount Holly, N.C., touting vehicles powered by a fossil fuel produced by drilling. The president, who recently touted pond scum as an energy source of the future, embraced...

Well the economy is ‘moving in the right direction’ at least temporarily as Obama says, and oil and gas prices prices are on the rise again moving in the 'wrong' direction. After killing the Canadian Oil pipeline Obama and his Democrat lackeys are claiming that Obama is the oil production president, claiming that domestic oil production is way higher now under Obama than when Bush was in office. In fact they claim that domestic oil production is SO high under Obama that they and Obama and Pelosi are once again calling for raising taxes specifically on domestic oil production (code...

Energy: Industry leaders gathered in Houston say rising fuel output comes in spite of, not because of, the president's policies and the pain at the pump will soon be excruciating. Energy executives and other industry players gathered for the North American Prospect Expo (NAPE) in Houston shredded administration assertions that it is opening up areas for oil and gas exploration and that its policies are responsible for increased oil and gas production on President Obama's watch. "These have been the most difficult three years from a policy standpoint that I've ever seen in my career," Bruce Vincent, president of Houston...

President Barack Obama on Thursday assailed Republicans for what he described as a flawed and dishonest strategy for reducing gas prices, predicting his rivals would offer nothing but more drilling and political promises of $2-a-gallon gas. Said the president: "The American people aren't stupid." "That's not a plan, especially since we're already drilling. That's a bumper sticker," Obama said in a stop at the University of Miami. "It's not a strategy to solve our energy challenge. That's a strategy to get politicians through an election. You know there are no quick fixes to this problem." Obama spoke as gas has...

The United States’ rapidly declining crude oil supply has made a stunning about-face, shredding federal oil projections and putting energy independence in sight of some analyst forecasts. After declining to levels not seen since the 1940s, U.S. crude production began rising again in 2009. Drilling rigs have rushed into the nation’s oil fields, suggesting a surge in domestic crude is on the horizon. The number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quad­rupled in the past three years to 1,272, according to the Baker Hughes rig count. Including those in natural gas fields, the United States now has...

Gasoline prices are on their way up again. So too is the ire of gasoline purchasers who skipped Econ 101 in school...

[Thirty] years after a vicious winter storm ripped across the Atlantic Ocean and helped sink the world's largest and most advanced oil rig, memories of the Ocean Ranger tragedy are still painful and fresh. All 84 crew members died when the Ocean Ranger toppled and then sank on the Grand Banks in the early hours of Feb. 15, 1982. "It's still — the way it happened, there's no closure. It doesn't feel like there's any," said Connie Foley, who was 19 when her father Ron and his colleagues died at sea...

A huge oil-drilling rig reportedly sank in a storm off the coast of Newfoundland Monday morning, and all 84 men aboard were said to be missing in 50-foot seas and feared dead... (Page A8.)

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil company, is losing about $1 billion a year from drilling delays in the Gulf of Mexico since the 2010 Macondo disaster. Shell’s production in the region will be curbed by about 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent this year, similar to 2011, Chief Financial Officer Simon Henry said. The company expects to return to planned operations off the Gulf coast by 2014. “The cash flow implications are a billion dollars or more per year relative to where we want to be,” Henry said in London today. “We are catching up.” The company, which in...

A Chesapeake Energy drilling rig caught fire Thursday night outside of Sweetwater, Okla., according to a company spokesman and an online oil field drilling forum. The rig was drilling into a shallow gas pocket about four miles outside of Sweetwater when workers found an unexpectedly high pressure of natural gas at only 910 feet below the surface, Jim Gipson, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail. The site was supposed to be drilled to more than 12,000 feet vertically before being drilled horizontally, Gipson said. Soon after workers experienced the high pressure, the rig caught fire, sending flames several feet...

PITTSBURGH (AP) — One of the government's top scientists says much more research is needed to determine the possible impacts of shale gas drilling on human health and the environment. "Studies should include all the ways people can be exposed, such as through air, water, soil, plants and animals," Dr. Christopher Portier wrote to The Associated Press in an email. Portier is director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The jobs are plentiful. They pay very well, $29 per hour entry-level and up. No college degree is required, not even always a high school diploma. Training is provided, beyond prerequisite basic drilling and first aid classes. Yet Canada expects limited growth in drilling next year, due to a severe shortage of rig workers. "The greatest limiting factor when examining overall utilization rates will be the shortage of skilled rig workers," said the Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors (CAODC) in a November statement. "Industry suffered a great loss of skills and knowledge during the downturn of 2009 and it...

Election '12: A governor of an energy-rich state would use the "energy of the past" to create the jobs of the present rather than placing bets on solar panels and tilting at windmills. During the GOP presidential debates, Gov. Rick Perry was criticized for taking all the credit for Texas' job-creation record since he was not responsible for the oil and gas in the ground that created many of those jobs. True enough. But like Sarah Palin, the governor of another energy-rich state, he did foster a business-friendly climate as free from NIMBY regulations as possible, making the extraction of...

President Obama's United States Department of Agriculture has delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio for up to six months by cancelling a mineral lease auction for Wayne National Forest (WNF). The move was taken in deference to environmentalists, on the pretext of studying the effects of hydraulic fracturing. "Conditions have changed since the 2006 Forest Plan was developed," announced WNF Supervisor Anne Carey on Tuesday. "The technology used in the Utica & Marcellus Shale formations need to be studied to see if potential effects to the surface are significantly different than those identified in the Forest Plan." The study will...

BP won approval from the Interior Department to drill its first exploratory oil well in the Gulf of Mexico since the blowout of its Macondo well a year and a half ago touched off the country’s worst offshore environmental disaster. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said that BP met more stringent safety requirements devised by the federal government in the aftermath of the disaster. The company also planned to follow even tougher voluntary standards that exceeded the government’s rules. “This permit was approved only after thorough well design, blowout preventer, and containment capability reviews,” said bureau director Michael...

Good news, domestic energy fans! After extraordinary delays, it looks like there will finally be some energy production activity in the Gulf of Mexico once again. This time it’s in the fertile fields to the south and west of Florida, employing some brand spanking new deep-water drilling rigs with all the latest technical features. This is terrific, and I’m sure you’ll all join me in congratulating President Obama for moving forward with this much needed expansion of … What’s that? We’re not the ones doing the drilling? Then who is? “Before the end of the year, a Chinese-made drilling platform...