WANT CHEAPER ENERGY AND A BOOMING ECONOMY? THEN WE SHOULD JUST DRILL HERE NOW!

BBC:

The small, remote town of Sidney, Montana, is true to its cowboy roots - this is ranching country and outside one bar amidst the many pick-up trucks I noticed one with a huge set of bull horns stuck jauntily to the cab.

A nodding-donkey oil pump, Montana

But Sidney has another reason to feel bullish too: as America agonises over its future energy choices, Sidney is revelling in an oil boom.

The town's mayor, Bret Smelser, took me for a drive through the town and across the flat farmland that stretches off to the horizon in every direction to see the changes oil has brought.

Inside Sidney - population about 5,000 - the changes leap to the eye.

There's a new water-slide, for example, plenty of evidence of heavy investment in local schools and a startling number of slot-machine casinos whose operators presumably calculate that the townspeople and workers from the oilfields have money to burn.

There is an urban myth that it has also meant that Sidney has the highest-paid pizza delivery guy in North America, but we'll come back to that.

Mayor Smelser sums up the situation so far simply: "Oil has been good for us."

Shale reserves

On the landscape beyond the town limits, the change is less spectacular but equally impressive.

Dotted around the farmland are hundreds of nodding-donkey oil wells which are strangely reminiscent of the kind of pumps you'd have seen in action during oil booms in Texas, California or Oklahoma a century ago.

The similarity is deceptive. The oil boom up on the Northern Great Plains is based on dramatic changes in drilling technology. Oil deposits beyond the reach of even the most modern pumps and drills 20 years ago are now viable.

Sidney - and plenty of other small towns like it on the Great Plains of North Dakota and Montana - sit on top of the shale reserves of the Bakken Formation. They were first discovered and mapped in the 1950s but back then there was no way of reaching them.

Now, new technologies are changing the definition of what is, and is not, a recoverable oil deposit.

RTWT.

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ONLY ONE THING KEEPS AMERICA FROM FULLY EXPLOITING OUR OIL RESERVES AND CREATING MORE JOBS: THE DEMOCRATS.

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