According to CNS News, a report on the United States’ oil
reserves has been prepared for congress. The good news: we have
LOTS of oil. The bad news: myopic energy policy prevents us from
using about half of it. The report, which was produced at the
request of Congress by the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau
of Land Management (BLM), said there are 279 million acres under
federal management where oil and gas could potentially could be
extracted. More than half of it is totally off-limits to
drillers. “The total onshore resource is 31 billion barrels,”
said BLM’s lead scientist Richard Watson, who authored the
report. “Of that, 19 billion barrels are currently inaccessible
or 62 percent. A little over 2 billion barrels, or 8 percent, is
accessible under what we call standard lease terms.” If you add
in the 85.9 billion barrels of oil that lie offshore, as
determined by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management
Service, there are 117 billion barrels of oil on lands owned or
managed by the U.S. government