landpoke or nikuman
 

Or anybody else in the energy industry. What do you know about the Bakken Formation? Is this just another big discovery that will fizzle, like so many before have?

http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/...news2.13s.html

That article is a bit confusing. The Bakken play has been around a lot longer than 2007. They've been drilling through the formation for decades, but it wasn't until around 2000 that someone figured out that horizontal drilling was the key. Activity still seems to be brisk up there so I imagine it'll be going on for a while yet.

As an aside, there are misleading stats in that article that mainly revolve around the difference between reserves and recoverable reserves. There might well be 200+ billion barrels of oil in place but the recovery factor up there is very low giving you a still healthy but much lower recoverable reserve number. Something on the order of 10-12 billion barrels.