Is the United States Sitting on Trillions of Barrels of Oil?
By Tyler Crowe | March 30, 2013 |

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Five years ago, if someone told you the U.S. would be independent in 15 years, you might have thought that person was crazy. But thanks in large part to technological advancements in drilling, it's very possible that North America could be energy independent by 2020. Given this fundamental change, if I were to tell you that America may have an oil source that's more than the rest of the world's combined proven reserves, would you believe it?

There's a unique geological formation in the U.S. that could hold as much as 6 trillion barrels of oil, but there's a chance that we may never even touch this vast resource. Let's see why we haven't really touched it, and why we may never use it.

Kerogen, the kraken of energy sources
Kerogen lies deep under the surface, and very little is known about it. Like bituminous oil sands, kerogen is a solid organic matter that isn't extractable like traditional oil. Unlike bitumen, kerogen can't be extracted through an organic chemical solvent. It's an organic material within the rock itself, and the rock must be thermally treated to get the oil out. Total deposits of this type of resource is in the trillions of barrels, but much of it is trapped in places where the total oil extracted per ton of rock is so small as to not be economically feasible. For a kerogen deposit to be even remotely feasible, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the formation would need to be at least 15 feet thick and yield more than 15 gallons per ton of rock.

The EIA estimates that there are about 2.9 trillion barrels of recoverable kerogen deposits worldwide, and nestled tight within the Wind River, Unita, and Wasach Mountains of Wyoming and Colorado is the largest kerogen deposit in the world, with about 1.8 trillion barrels of technically recoverable oil. If all of this oil were economically recoverable, we could supply U.S. energy demand for more than 250 years based on current demand.

If this be true then America are on the Pigs Back. No more need for Americas young to die in foreign lands for oil. Hope this is true.

Read somewhere, if Alaska was tapped, there is enough oil to last us 100 years.

We still need to invest in renewable, unless the world is going to end anytime soon. And the way we're going, it just might.

Nope. Our leaders will send us to steal everybody elses until it's gone before they use ours.... by then they'll have control of everything well in hand, and Americans without guns to do anything about it.

Oil is just about everywhere on the earth. The Russians have known the secret to how to get oil for decades. You simply have to go very deep.
We are not going to run out of oil, but we might poison a lot of water and contaminate the oceans going after it.