Editor:

No oil on-shore?

The 200,000 square mile Bakken oil formation, much of which is located in northwest North Dakota, contains an estimated 149.2 billion barrels of oil, of which only 1.4 percent or 2.1 billion barrels are extractable by current methods.

It is the largest continuous oil accumulation ever assessed by the U.S. Geological Survey. The USGS notes that 105 million barrels of oil have been produced from the Bakken by the end of last year.

The Elm Coulee field located on the western edge of the Bakken, in eastern Montana, produces more than 100,000 barrels of oil per day, which is more oil than all other oil wells in Montana, combined! It is believed that there are between 3 billion and 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil in North Dakota alone.

The director of the North Dakota department of mineral resources believes there is enough oil in northwest North Dakota to keep 70 rigs working for the next 19 years.

We are given the impression that little or no oil exploration is going on in the United States. This is not the case as the current nationwide rig count is 1,839 on the week ending May 2nd, with 1,477 rigs drilling for gas and 362 for crude oil. Colorado has 122 rigs working, Wyoming has 67 and North Dakota has 70.

Instead of drilling offshore, perhaps we should work on methods of extracting the currently un-extractable estimated 147 billion barrels of oil that are trapped in the Bakken formation.

The current hotbed is Mountrail County, N.D., with many new wells coming on line in recent months and more to follow. Some of the wells in Mountrail County had an initial production rate of more than 3,000 bopd (barrels of petroleum per day)!

At this point, you are probably all wondering, like I am, why all of this new oil has not impacted the price of gasoline and diesel fuel.

Information source: the May 7 edition of the Oil Patch Hotline newsletter, which is published in Williston, N.D.

TERRY REHAK, Worland