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LYNN AND TERRY COUNTY, TX (KCBD) - Advanced methods and technology have oil companies interested in drilling throughout several counties in our area. Land owners are receiving offers to lease mineral rights to the companies, and many of them are seeing big offers. Geologists think there is oil and natural gas in large shale formations underneath Hockley, Terry, Gaines, Dawson, and Lynn counties, and they want to get it out. If they're right, the economy of communities in these counties could change forever. "I don't think I'd have an opportunity in 3 or 4 lifetimes to see this," Bill McGowan...

Energy: The brightest hope for America's energy independence has been shut down by an Interior Department that says it wants to review the rules for leases. It really wants to kill off oil altogether. The game is this: Say that you want to find domestic oil and gas in a "smart" way, so you have to study things for a while. Then let enviros tie you up in court to block what you really don't want to do anyway, increase America's supply of domestic energy, keeping jobs and money here. On Tuesday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that the Obama...

The Bakken play in the Williston basin could become the world’s largest discovery in the last 30-40 years, a senior manager at Continental Resources Inc. said Feb. 16. Ultimate recovery from the overall play is now estimated at 24 billion bbl of oil, compared with US reserves of nearly 20 billion bbl, he told the NAPE Expo in Houston. The 24 billion bbl figure is five times the US Geological Survey’s 2008 estimate and compares with the 151 million bbl the survey put forth as recently as the mid-1990s, said Jack Stark, Continental senior vice-president, exploration (OGJ, Apr. 21, 2008,...

In response to a legal challenge by conservation groups, the Obama administration today launched a process to reconsider — and probably rewrite — a Bush-era plan for developing oil shale in the West. At issue are decisions by former President George W. Bush’s Interior Department to open roughly 2 million acres of land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming to commercial oil shale leasing, while also approving regulations setting royalty rates for eventual production that critics blasted as too low. Under a court settlement filed today, more than a dozen groups, including the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense...

Dr. Daniel Fine of the Mining and Minerals Resources Institute at MIT addressed Fletcher students at a talk sponsored by the International Security Studies Program and offered his insights into how the development of new technology will allow the United States to tap vast, previously inaccessible, resources of natural gas that will impact everything from the price of gasoline to the ability of Chinese companies to buy equity in Russian natural gas fields.

Energy Policy: As the job-killing deepwater drilling ban continues offshore, our interior secretary defends an onshore ban imposed in Utah. If we could drill in places like that, maybe oil wouldn't be gushing a mile under the Gulf of Mexico. The 64-million-gallon question in the Gulf oil spill is why we were drilling 5,000 feet down in the first place. The administration line, as expressed by the president in his recent Oval Office speech, is that oil resources on land and just offshore are running out. The falsity of that claim can be seen in the battle over 77 oil...

Tuesday night, following a tour of the Gulf Coast area, the President of the United States addressed the nation regarding the state of the BP oil spill. In his speech from the Oval Office, President Obama spoke regarding our nation's dependence upon oil and how we need to break that dependence. During his speech (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-nation-bp-oil-spill), the president made a statement that was blatantly false. The president noted, "We consume more than 20% of the world's oil, but have less than 2% of the world's oil reserve. And that's part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the...

The new Interior Department looks into a move to lock in beneficial royalties and regulations for companies with leases on public lands -- denounced by some as a massive giveaway to the oil industry. Reporting from Washington - The Obama Interior Department is reviewing a decision made by the Bush administration in its final days that attempted to lock in lucrative royalty rates and favorable regulations for oil companies holding leases for oil shale development on public lands.

Energy Policy: New York's governor wants to tap into a shale formation that can supply the entire U.S. with natural gas for 65 years. Will NIMBY environmentalists let him stimulate New York's and America's energy economy? Last week, David Patterson released a draft report of his Energy Planning Board that does something Democrats are loath to do: It proposes developing a domestic energy resource — the huge amounts of natural gas trapped in the Marcellus Shale formation. New York produces 5% of its natural gas in-state and imports more than 95% from the Gulf Coast and Canada. The Marcellus Shale...

Energy Policy: New York's governor wants to tap into a shale formation that can supply the entire U.S. with natural gas for 65 years. Will NIMBY environmentalists let him stimulate New York's and America's energy economy?Last week, David Patterson released a draft report of his Energy Planning Board that does something Democrats are loath to do: It proposes developing a domestic energy resource — the huge amounts of natural gas trapped in the Marcellus Shale formation. New York produces 5% of its natural gas in-state and imports more than 95% from the Gulf Coast and Canada. The Marcellus Shale stretches...

Energy Policy: The chief economist of the International Energy Agency says the world is running out of oil. We've been told that for the last 150 years. The only thing we're running out of is the will to drill.Ever since the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pa., in 1859, experts have been predicting we would soon run out of oil. The latest is Dr. Fatih Birol, chief economist for the International Energy Agency in Paris, whose job it is to assess future energy supplies by OECD countries. In an interview with the Independent, Dr. Birol says that based...

A top expert tells Congress that oil will be around for a long time and high inventories and low prices are no excuse not to find more. Oil shock? How about a no-oil shock? Be careful what you wish for, goes the old proverb. Well, as we all had hoped, energy prices have fallen — but only as part of the global decline in economic activity. This has been used as an excuse to further discourage exploration for and development of domestic oil resources. But if the economy does recover, that policy could provoke another recession.

Energy: New drilling techniques may open up a 14-year supply of natural gas trapped in porous rock in the Northeast. That is, if environmentalists in New York and elsewhere don't keep it trapped in the ground.Natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels, so clean that it is a key part of oilman T. Boone Pickens' plan to wean us off foreign sources of energy. Natural gas can fuel a new generation of automobiles that would help us achieve energy independence and at the same time contribute to a cleaner planet. In the northeastern U.S., there is a massive...

Energy: With a media wind at his back, Barack Obama regularly gets away with false and distorted statements. He repeated one Tuesday that seems superficially plausible but should not go unchallenged.ust as he said during the Sept. 26 University of Mississippi debate with John McCain, the Illinois Democrat claimed during the Nashville town hall setting that "we have 3% of the world's oil reserves and we use 25% of the world's oil. So what that means is that we can't simply drill our way out of the problem." It's disappointing that McCain failed to call out Obama on his figures,...

Energy: While members of Congress take vacations their constituents can no longer afford, a country prepares to end its dependence on foreign oil by extracting supplies from shale rock. It's not the U.S. It's in the Middle East.Jordan imports 95% of its oil. Unlike the U.S., the desert kingdom plans on doing something about it. It does not, however, plan to cover its flat open spaces with solar panels or wind farms. It's going to do something the Democratic Congress has refused to do — get oil from its abundant shale rock. On Sunday, Maher Hjazin, head of the Jordanian...

During a recent flight from Denver to Grand Junction, Colo., I found myself sitting next to Harold L. Bennett, a 78-year-old civil engineer from Albuquerque. In addition to being on his way to a business meeting in Vernal, Utah, Bennett was on his way to securing the nation’s energy future. Before the 55-minute journey on the twin-prop aircraft ended, I learned three important things from Bennett: * First, I learned he has held the patent on the world’s only Clear Coal™ — not “clean coal” — technology since the early 1970s and has improved it twice; * Second, I learned...

The U.S. Geological Survey Thursday increased its estimate of oil shale resources in the Piceance Basin in northwestern Colorado by 50% to more than 1.5 trillion barrels. The Obama administration has halted commercial lease sales of oil shale development, saying more research, particularly on the environmental consequences, is needed before moving ahead with development. The USGS said its latest assessment of the nation's largest oil shale basin, the first since 1989, didn't include a recoverable resource estimate, however, because the resource is currently not economical to recover and there are still a number of environmental concerns about development.

Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is once again taking steps towards increasing our energy dependence. Just a few weeks after the Obama Administration unnecessarily slowed the process of leasing offshore areas to energy companies for drilling; Secretary Salazar is now rescinding leasing plans for oil-shale development on federal land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.The amount of oil available through oil shale is staggering. Some estimates have 1.2 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil available in the Green River Formation, an area which expands through most of Colorado and parts of Utah and Wyoming. According to the U.S. Department...

The US Department of the Interior will offer a second round of research, development, and demonstration leases for oil shale in Colorado and Utah and withdraw the Bush administration's proposal for expanded RD&D leases, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Wednesday. "We need to push forward aggressively with research, development and demonstration of oil shale technologies to see if we can find a safe and economically viable way to unlock these resources on a commercial scale," Salazar said. "The research, development, and demonstration leases we will offer can help answer critical questions about oil shale, including about the viability of emerging...

I wonder if this will ever see the light of day, and if so, what Al Gore and the left would have to say about it? The U.S. Geological Service issued a report in April ('08) that only scientists and oilmen knew was coming, but man, was it big! It was a revised report (hadn't been updated since '95) on how much oil was in this area of the western 2/3 of North Dakota; western South Dakota; and extreme eastern Montana ... check THIS out: The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, and has the...