Oceans of Crude?

"John Bartelson, who smokes Marlboro Lights through fingers blackened with tractor grease, may look like an average wheat farmer. He isn't. He's one of North Dakota's new oil barons. Every month, he gets a check for tens of thousands of dollars from Houston company EOG Resources, which drilled two oil wells on his land last year. ... His new wealth springs from the Bakken formation, a sprawling deposit of high-quality crude beneath the durum wheat fields of North Dakota, Montana and southern Saskachewan and Manitoba, The Bakken may give the U.S.--the world''s biggest importer of oil-- a new domestic energy source. ... Best of all, the Bakken could be huge. The U.S. Geological Survey's [USGS] Leigh Price, a Denver geochemist who died in 2000, estimated that the Bakken might hold 413 billion barrels. ... The USGS said in April that the Bakken holds as much as 4.3 billion barrels that can be recovered using today's engineering techniques... Now, companies like EOG are drilling horizontally.. ... Then they pump pressurized water and sand into the hole to fracture the dolomite, making cracks for the oil to seep through", Houston Chronicle, 8 June 2008.

Go EOG, go! At $135 a barrel, what you're doing makes sense. At least to me. Connie Yu, my 2 June 2008 post, are you and your Stanford friends listening?