Originally Posted by RockyBoy

My father-in-law is a directional drilling engineer and was working for a company about three years ago that was costing the shale oil that is very abundant in the U.S. With the technology they had then, it was going to cost them $110/bbl to extract the oil and the costs would go down over time as the technology improved. They anticipated they could get the costs down to under $80/bbl but it would take a few years of "working the process out".

There are two ways to get shale oil out both of which are very environmentally invasive and probably would not fly in the U.S. unless the world is going to end. You either strip mine the shale and cook it out like they do the oil sand in Canada or you pump a high pressure water/chemical solution into the ground that fractures the shale, seperates the oil, pump the solution back up, and refine the oil out. You can't simply drill a well and pump it out.....we've gotten all that oil out that can be found in the U.S.

I don't think we are "saving" it, it just isn't cost effective to get it out yet or the big oil guys would have already done it. Now ANWAR and sub-sea oil off the coasts is a different story......that we can get if the politicians and environmentalists would let us.