Oil In The Bakken

The New Yorker reports from the North Dakota oil boom:

The rock is the Bakken formation, a layer of the basin that geologists believe holds a twenty-five-thousand-square-mile sea of oil. (The formation is mostly beneath the surface of North Dakota, but it extends into Montana and Canada.) The head of the state’s department of mineral resources, Lynn Helms, recently estimated that the region could contain eleven billion barrels of oil that can be obtained using current technology, nearly enough to supply the United States for two years. That assessment has doubled since a 2008 United States Geological Survey study, and the amount that will eventually be recoverable is the subject of intense speculation. “The Williston Basin is still relatively underexplored and poorly understood in terms of its geology,” Helms said. “It’s a subterranean detective story.”
A hundred and thirteen million barrels of crude oil were produced in North Dakota last year—more than five per cent of the country’s domestic output. (The U.S. produces slightly less than half of the oil it consumes.) The increase is well timed. Last month, with oil prices rising, President Obama announced the goal of reducing by one-third America’s reliance on foreign oil by 2025. But the restrictions on offshore drilling that followed the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill have limited domestic oil production, and the disastrous blowup at Japan’s Fukushima plant last month has made an increase in nuclear power politically untenable. Meanwhile, the past two years were the first since 1991 in which domestic oil production increased, owing substantially to North Dakota’s contributions. Geologists believe that Williston could be at the beginning of a twenty-year boom.

I'm rarely an optimist, and I think the oil guys will end up being high on this field.  I would anticipate rapidly decreasing production from wells after they start production.  Oil men are natural optimists, so I guess we'll see what the future holds.  We may still be able to find large oil plays, but we won't be able to find them and drill them as fast as we consume the oil.