How Much is the Oil in the Green River Formation Worth?!?!

Originally published on LonelyConservative.com

President Obama is gearing up for yet another debt ceiling debacle; and his solution is to raise taxes on the rich, even though he knows there aren’t enough wealthy people in America to cover the budget deficit, let alone pay off the debt we already have. If he really wanted to do something about the budget deficits and the debt, he’d sign an executive order directing his various agencies to open up the Green River Formation for oil shale development. It’s a gold mine. A $60 trillion (yes, with a T) gold mine.

Wait! What? Say that again! “About equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves!”

Since the GAO testimony cited the Rand Corp., I poked around to see what Rand had said about the Green River Formation.

On June 3, 2011, Rand’s James T. Bartis appeared in the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power.

“At crude oil prices of $100 per barrel, the value of the oil that might be recovered from federally owned land is over $60 trillion,” Bartis said in written testimony. “The public wealth embedded in our oil shale lands is staggering.”

The current national debt — staggering in itself — is about $15.6 trillion, or a little more than one fourth of the $60 trillion that Bartis said might be derived from federally owned shale-oil deposits. …

“Most of the high value resources lie within in a very small area (roughly 30 by 35 miles) within Colorado’s Piceance Basin and within a small portion of the nearby Uinta Basin within Utah,” he said. ….

To be sure, as both Bartis and the GAO point out, developing the shale oil these lands hold will pose technical, environmental and social challenges.

In the meanwhile, you can expect many liberals in the federal government to treat the oil deposits in the Green River Formation the way F. Scott Fitzgerald’s villainous family in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” treated their family jewel. They will want to keep it as secret as possible and develop it as little as they can.

They, too, will seek to maintain an artificial scarcity. And the longer they do, the sooner you will be riding mass transit.

Read the whole thing. I guess if Obama was to allow these resources to be developed he’d have nothing left to demagogue, he’d tick off the environuts in his base, and he wouldn’t have an excuse to pay off his cronies with green energy pork.

Obama: the anti-prosperity president.

Read more at LonelyConservative.com

Follow The Lonely Conservative on Twitter – twitter.com/lonelycon

Read more at The Lonely Conservative