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Over the past five years, technology has improved the productivity of the typical oil or gas rig on America’s shale fields between 200 and 300 percent.

Don’t expect the energy boom in Montana and the Dakotas to end anytime soon. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the formations below these three states hold double the amount of oil and triple the amount of natural gas than was believed five years ago. National Journal reports: The formations, called Bakken and Three Forks, span much of western North Dakota, the northern tip of South Dakota and the northeastern tip of Montana. The last time the United States Geological Survey assessed this area for its oil and gas reserves was in 2008. But that assessment did not...

Well, well, well, so Obama has embarked on his third war in little more than two years. You've got to admit that "flexibility" is his middle name. Or at least one of his middle names: Barack Barry Hussein "Flexibility" Soetoro Obama, Jr. Those are the names we know so far, but The Donald thinks there might be more. Whodda thunk? Here we are barely into the first week of what started out as a "No-Fly Zone" and it is now turning out to be Air Al Qaida. Ten years ago, AQ had a mere four civilian airplanes to crash into...

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) wants answers from the US taxpayer supported Export-Import bank about a $2 billion loan to Brazil for offshore drilling. Vitter’s home state is suffering under a moratorium imposed by President Barack Obama. Vitter said Louisianians “are frustrated” and he wants to know “why permitting domestically is nearly stalled…” Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) had questions about ExIM—nine years ago when he asked Congress to reject the reauthorization of ExIm for “economic, constitutional and moral reasons.” Vitter sent a letter to Fred Hochberg, Ex-Im president, on March 17. Vitter asked Hochberg to identify all US companies that have...

Kerry Has Investments in Companies Accused of Violating Iran Sanctions Daniel Halper December 21, 2012 12:59 PM John Kerry, who will be nominated later today to be the next secretary of state, is the richest member of the U.S. Senate. His estimated net worth is, at minimum, $198.65 million, according to disclosure forms. Kerry's disclosure forms also reveal that he has invested in companies accused of doing business with Iran. One of the companies Kerry is invested in is called Petroleo Brasileiro SA Petrobras (Petrobras), it's a Brazilian-based oil and gas corporation. Disclosure forms reveal that Kerry has between $150,000...

The U.S. Coast Guard says an explosion took place on a platfrom near West Cote Blanche around 9 a.m. today. Four people were put on medivac transport and taken out of the area, and are now hospitalized. Two people remain missing. Petty Officer 3rd Class Jonathan Lally, a spokesman for the Coast Guard, did not immediately have information on the conditions of those taken to hospitals. Lally says two helicopters, an airplane and small boats were sent to the area. The Coast Guard has now confirmed that the fire is out on the platform. The production platform is owned by...

Drillers in Utah and Colorado are poking into a massive shale deposit trying to find a way to unlock oil reserves that are so vast they would swamp OPEC. A recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that if half of the oil bound up in the rock of the Green River Formation could be recovered it would be "equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves." Both the GAO and private industry estimate the amount of oil recoverable to be 3 trillion barrels. "In the past 100 years — in all of human history -- we have...

In the final days of the election I made what turned out to be a clearly futile effort to demonstrate that the future of energy production, as well as the associated jobs and economic boost which go with it, could be significantly affected by the outcome. One candidate had a substantially pro-energy policy which included completing the Keystone pipeline and unshackling promising areas of domestic energy development. The other did not. Taking a line from Bruce Willis for a moment... I hate it when I'm right. The Interior Department on Friday issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres...

Earlier today, Governor Palin retweeted Jedediah Bila concerning this stunning move by the Obama administration to cut off 11.5 acres of domestic energy production in Alaska

President Obama certainly knows how to talk a good game when it comes to energy policy; to the low-information layman, “all of the above� sounds like a superficially excellent plan. Work on green energy development, but keep the traditional fuel production comin’ — it’s the best of both worlds, right? Except that that’s not what the Obama administration has done at all. While the feds have poured billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars into picking economic winners and losers in the clean-energy field, Obama’s EPA/Energy/Interior team have waged a regulatory war on the coal industry and only allowed for relatively...

The media is showing bias in failing to give much attention to the rise in gasoline prices under President Barack Obama, says former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Gas prices now average $3.82 per gallon around the country, about double the level prevailing when Obama took office. “When George [W.] Bush was president, we heard about gas prices every time,” Huckabee, now a radio talk show host told Fox News Monday, Politico reports. “And they would take cameras to the pumps and have someone almost tearfully explaining that they were paying almost $2.50 a gallon. It’s amazing how quiet the media...

A new film starring Matt Damon presents American oil and natural gas producers as money-grubbing villains purportedly poisoning rural American towns. It is therefore of particular note that it is financed in part by the royal family of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. The creators of Promised Land have gone to absurd lengths to vilify oil and gas companies, as Scribe’s Michael Sandoval noted Wednesday. Since recent events have demonstrated the relative environmental soundness of hydraulic fracturing – a technique for extracting oil and gas from shale formations – Promised Land’s script has been altered to make doom-saying environmentalists the...

In what his campaign is billing as a major policy speech, Mitt Romney will unveil an energy plan Thursday that would give states the power to determine whether drilling should occur on federal lands within their borders as part of a larger effort to increase domestic oil production and achieve energy independence. Under current law, the federal government controls oil and gas permits for federal lands. But in a speech at an oilfield services company in Hobbs. N.M., Romney will argue that determination should be up to state officials, insisting individual states are in a better position to "develop, adopt...

Apparently, even though the administration has a five year plan to allow drilling in the Gulf and the Arctic...they're not that interested in living up to it. Shocker, I know. One would think that one of the primary requirements of energy independence would be having the ability to collect the energy through which one becomes independent by using. Somehow, this logic escapes the Obama administration as evidenced by their “Five-Year Plan.” However, if their goal was to diminish opportunities for energy resources, they’ve done a magnificent job. It is pretty well established that there is oil in the Gulf of...

"Until California surrenders to realism, its oil drillers will be fighting political and regulatory head winds. If they can look anywhere for hope, it's not to the political elites but to the broader public. Ordinary Californians are not anti-oil ideologues, and a fair number favor drilling off the state's coast."

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin on the future of oil exploration in the U.S. and the importance of the Keystone Pipeline.

Repsol, has confirmed that (his) company and its partners are abandoning drilling offshore Cuba, representing a major blow to the island's ambitions to secure oil self-sufficiency.... The decision follows reports that the Jaguey-1 exploration well drilled by Repsol and partners Statoil (Norway) and ONGC (India) on Block N26, in Cuba's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the Gulf of Mexico, had come up dry.

The heaviest polar ice in more than a decade could postpone the start of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean until the beginning of August, a delay of up to two weeks, Shell Alaska officials said. Unveiling a newly refurbished ice-class rig that is poised to begin drilling two exploratory wells this summer in the Beaufort Sea, Shell executives said Friday that the unusually robust sea ice would further narrow what already is a tight window for operations. The company's $4-billion program is designed to measure the extent of what could be the United States' most important new inventory...

While the White House and its media water-carriers try to distract the American public with gay-marriage talk and half-century-old tales of Mitt Romney’s prep-school pranks, the inconvenient truth remains: President Obama is responsible for perpetrating jaw-dropping, job-killing scientific fraud. And his minions are still trying to cover it up. New internal e-mails disclosed by the House Natural Resources Committee this week show that a supposedly exculpatory report on the administration’s doctored drilling moratorium analysis — issued by the Department of Interior’s inspector general’s office — was itself incomplete, misleading, and unsubstantiated. Even more damning, the documents reveal that the White...

Chairman Hastings: Documents Raise Serious Questions about Thoroughness and Independence of Inspector General’s Investigation into Drilling Moratorium Report Hastings sends letter to IG and releases documents received by Committee to date WASHINGTON, D.C., May 10, 2012 - House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (WA-04) today sent a letter to Department of the Interior’s Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall expressing deep concern with the thoroughness of the Office of Inspector General’s (IG) investigation into whether an Obama Administration report that recommended a six-month drilling moratorium was intentionally edited to incorrectly state the views of peer reviewers, and with the IG’s...

U.S. Rep. Connie Mack, running in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, has been urging the public to sign his petition calling for the Keystone XL Pipeline as part of his efforts to promote more domestic drilling. "I have always said that I would be for drilling," Mack said at an event this month promoting the petition. "But I think that's an issue the state should have a say in — in determining how far it's going to be off the coast of Florida. We ought to allow the state to have a say in that decision." [SNIP] Mack campaign...

Energy Policy: The administration claims there's no "silver bullet" to lower gas prices and that they've kept rising in the face of higher domestic production, as if the law of supply and demand has suddenly been repealed. It hasn't, and increased production on private and state lands doesn't blunt the impact on prices when 94% of federal onshore lands and 97% of federal offshore lands are off-limits to oil and gas drilling. A key factor in gas prices is and always has been future supplies and potential disruptions to those supplies. Another is the fact that we are the only...

House committee says Obama administration may have edited 2010 report to favor Gulf oil drilling moratorium The Obama administration was subpoenaed Tuesday for documents that congressional investigators hope would shed light on how a government report was edited to indicate experts endorsed a moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf following the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. Interior Department officials have refused to comply with repeated requests from the House Resources Committee to provide documents that lawmakers say would show if political appointees at the agency or White House were involved in the editing decision and whether it was intentional. “President Obama...

Energy Policy: The Interior Department announces a five-year environmental study of offshore oil sites along the Atlantic coast with possible drilling off the Old Dominion in 2018 — only seven years after a promised lease sale. Despite taking credit for rising oil production on private and state lands he has nothing to do with, and claiming he supports opening up areas for domestic exploration as part of his "all-of-the-above" energy policy, President Obama in fact despises domestic fossil fuel production and moves to block it at every opportunity. During a visit to Norfolk, Va., last week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar...

Many Americans believe that whenever a politician opens his mouth, something pops out other than the truth. But on the issue of energy, this President has really stepped into an issue and now seems able to maintain his political credibility solely with more lies and obfuscation. We live in an age in which America and the rest of the world has a huge need for electrical power – with no evidence of reduced demand on the horizon. Even though our automobiles, appliances, and tools have become more energy-efficient, we have more devices than ever like smartphones and tablets and...

Yesterday the Obama administration announced a delaying tactic which will put off the possibility of new offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast for at least five years: The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur.

Yesterday the Obama administration announced a delaying tactic which will put off the possibility of new offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast for at least five years: The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell notes that a planned lease sale, which the administration cancelled last year, will now be put off until at least 2018. As you might expect, Republicans were not impressed with the decision: "The president's actions have closed an entire new...

President Obama supports job creation, economic growth and revenue generation – except when he doesn’t. Official announcements from his Labor Department reported that the nation’s February unemployment rate is still 8.3 percent. That’s a decent decline from previous months. But the reality is far worse. Most of that job growth was in business and professional services, and half was temporary. Millions of Americans are working part-time or multiple low-wage jobs to make ends meet. Overall, 23.5 million are out of work or underemployed. Factor all that in, and the real unemployment rate is 14.9%, according to University of Maryland...

Soaring gas prices pose a major electoral vulnerability to a President so damaged he refused to celebrate the two year anniversary of his marquee domestic accomplishment. That is why, for the past several weeks, President Obama and his administration have been in damage control mode. At stops around the country, he sought to deflect blame for the pain Americans are experiencing at the pump. President Obama’s basic defense goes something like this: presidents cannot control the price of gasoline, but I have increased domestic oil production and decreased our reliance on foreign oil, so really, when you think about...

Offshore drilling has been pushed further onto Virginia's horizon. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on Tuesday announced the oil and gas leasing plan for 2012-2017, and Virginia did not make the list. The proposed program includes 15 potential lease sales, with 12 in the Gulf of Mexico and three off Alaska. Virginia's lease sale was scheduled for 2011, but the federal government delayed it until at least 2017 after the April-July 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst offshore spill in U.S. history. Gov. Bob McDonnell, who wanted to use the millions that...

The Department of Agriculture is considering requiring an extensive environmental review before issuing mortgages to people who have leased their land for oil and gas drilling.

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...