Mike Huckabee earlier today on Fox:
I think it’s important to let the American people know we’ve got enough oil in North Dakota. It could dwarf Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, well I think it's important to let the American people know that even the most optimistic assessment of North Dakota's shale fields puts their oil recoverable reserves at 24 billion barrels (using currently existing technology), and that's about six to eight times as much as the official USGS estimate. A study by North Dakota found there could be as much as 167 billion barrels...but according to the same study, only about 2 billion of it is readily recoverable using current technology.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, estimates that it has 260 billion barrels of readily accessible reserves based on today's technology, with between 358 billion and 900 billion barrels total in the ground.
Therefore, based on current technologies, Saudi Arabia has somewhere between eleven and one hundred thirty times more oil than North Dakota. So there's some dwarfing going on, but Huckabee has it backwards.
To put these numbers in some perspective, the U.S. consumes about 7 billion barrels per year and the world consumes about 30, so even if you were willing to ignore the implications of burning fossil fuels for global warming, you'd be taking one hell of a gamble if you wanted to bet America's energy security on North Dakota's oil shale. Even if we were able to develop the technology to recover every lost drop of what's there, it's a near certainty that the technology would not represent the most affordable way of getting energy. The only reason why people would even consider turning to North Dakota is if the price of energy soars even higher than it is today.
Conservatives like Huckabee would like the public to believe the government and environmentalists are the main reason why North Dakota isn't pumping oil like Saudi Arabia, but that's ridiculous. Geology trumps those kinds of politics when it comes to something as economically vital as energy. To put it simply, if North Dakota really had what we need—an abundant supply of cheap energy—we'd be tapping into it already.