[I know the U.S. has enormous amounts of coal, and significant untapped gas reserves (does fracking poison the groundwater?) The figures cited for oil surprise me; I'll have to check into that.
UPDATE: This article uses inflated numbers. "Proven" reserves -- about 20 billion barrels of oil, 245 trillion cubic feet of gas. See below, and see this link for "The Imaginary World in which Washington Lives (Huffington Post, Dean Baker) for a different viewpoint.
I do know that any drilling that starts today will not come online as gasoline at the pumps for a long time, and so won't be a short-term fix; I also know that the U.S. production bottleneck is in refining, not extraction. There hasn't been a new refinery built in the U.S. in over 30 years -- one way the oil majors are able to keep prices high.]
By Nicholas Ballasy, CNSNews.com [Excerpt]
According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the total proved reserves and technically recoverable amount of oil in the United States, as of 2009, was 164.6 billion barrels. The United States consumes about 6.8 billion barrels of oil each year (of which about 60 percent is imported).
[Check the CRS report cited above: U.S. proved reserves of oil total 19.1 billion barrels, reserves of natural gas total 244.7 trillion cubic feet, and natural gas liquids reserves of 9.3 billion barrels. Undiscovered technically recoverable oil in the United States is 145.5 billion barrels, and undiscovered technically
recoverable natural gas is 1,162.7 trillion cubic feet. The demonstrated reserve base for coal is 488 billion short tons, of which 261 billion short tons are considered technically recoverable."
The "technically recoverable oil" means oil that can technically be recovered, no matter what the cost -- obviously not a practical measurement. The "undiscovered" means that it's an estimate not obtained from drilling but from comparing geological formations, et cetera, and estimates vary wildly -- sometimes by a factor of 150. See the report for an explanation of terms, but "proven" reserves are agreed to be, ballpark, 20 billion barrels -- a little over three years' supply.]
As for natural gas in the United States, the CRS report, using data from the federal Energy Information Administration, shows there are 1,407.4 trillion cubic feet – America consumes 22.74 cubic feet [sic] of natural gas per year. [Proven, from the same report: 244.7 trillion feet.]
As for coal, the report shows that the United States has a technically recoverable amount of 261 billion short tons; the country consumes about 1 billion short tons per year. [From the same report: "For example, in one specific case in Wyoming, 47% of the in-place coal is technically recoverable, but the available, economically recoverable coal is only about 6% of the in-place coal. While these proportions may vary between 5% and 20%, depending upon the specific conditions for each coal-mining area, very large coal numbers are viewed with some caution because in-place numbers, or even recoverable numbers, may not provide a realistic assessment of the coal that could actually be produced." The amount of coal that can be actually mined may be as low as 1/8th of that amount, or 30 years' supply. The actual number will lie somewhere between the two extreme estimates.]
Not counting technological advances in locating new deposits of fossil fuel and discounting any imports from other countries, the United States by itself, given current demand, has at least enough oil for 24 years, enough natural gas for 62 years, and enough coal for 261 years. [Proven, economically recoverable: enough oil for 3.5 years, enough natural gas for 11 years, enough coal for -- well, quite a while.]
Those numbers do not include new deposits of fossil fuels that may be found in the future and as technology advances. Nor do the numbers include the estimated worldwide reserves from selected nations (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Venezuela), which total 1.3 trillion barrels of oil; 6.6. trillion cubic feet of natural gas; and 930 billion short tons of coal, according to the CRS report.
When those fuels are converted into one source of measurement, such as barrels of oil, says the CRS, then worldwide reserves from those six nations equal 5.7 trillion barrels of oil.
On a related note, potentially recoverable reserves of oil from shale – an expensive and currently cost-prohibitive operation – are estimated to be between 800 billion and 1.38 trillion barrels in the United States alone, according to the CRS report. These recoverable reserves – not counting imports -- could potentially meet current U.S. demand for oil for another 147 years.
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