From Slashdot.org: HighWizard posts "Oil Deposit Could Increase US Reserves 10x"

Occasionally you'll get a gem of a piece posted on Slashdot.org that has academic/trading/investment merit. This article is about the release of a report on the Bakkan Formation. There's lots of good stuff in the following Slashdot story thread.

HighWizard notes the upcoming release, on Thursday, of a report by the US Geological Survey on the Bakken Formation. This is an oil field covering 200,000 square miles and underlying parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. A geologist who began surveying the field, before dying in 2000, believed it may hold as much as 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Later estimates have ranged to the hundreds of billions of barrels. Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence.

Read more at Slashdot.org: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/08/2111201&from=rss

If this is true, which companies are at the Bakkan formation?

Reader Itchyeyes (908311) contributes:

The people that have interests in the Bakken in North Dakota are not the majors. They are companies like EOG, Marathon, Kodiak, and Questar. These companies do not have refineries. They sell at the market price, they have no say in what their product goes for. They do not have enough reserves to make any impact on market prices even if they wanted to.

Also, he gives reasons as to why oil extraction from Bakkan formation is becoming a viable economic alternative due to high oil prices.

Of note is the following rant by Reader iq_in_binary (305246):

You, sir, are a complete fucking moron.

The big oil companies haven't been making their profit by virtue of artificially controlling the supply, they've been doing it by selling more than they've ever sold before. The profits reaped last year and the year previous wasn't because of raising their profit margins (I.E. raising prices to increase their profit margin), they've been doing it by selling more petrol than in any years previous.

Big Oil has has the same business infrastructure, organizational structure, and sales methods as they've had for 50 fucking years. They held a razor thin profit margin on gasoline for going on 25 years now. For every dollar on gas, you spend maybe 3 pennies giving them profit. So quit bitching about oil companies gouging the public, because they aren't. You want to know the real culprit for gas prices these days? Our own fucking government, they make about a dollar per gallon on taxes.

Where does that money go? Who knows any more. Just quit bitching about a company actually doing good business, because for the most part the petrol companies are. They have to deal with literally thousands of different mixtures of gasoline being shipped among this country, the different ways to refine them, and finally the shipping, and they're only pulling 3% profit. Fuck you for thinking that's out of line. Learn your economics, and then learn how the real world works. The price of gas being as high as it is is MORE the gov's fault for spending so much money on pork that it has to rape us on gas to compensate. Bitch at your governments for taxing gas so much, then bitch at them for making good companies spend twice as much as they have to for making a good product, THEN bitch at the gas companies for not making things cheap enough when they're only pulling a 3% margin.

This is a capitalist economy, damnit, it's what is responsible for this country's well-being. Think about the business first, then bitch.

To which, I say, AMEN to that!