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There are billions of barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf. There is even more in Alaska. There is enough oil shale in the Rocky Mountain West alone to power America for the next hundred years. The Democrats say all this American energy is off limits.

We should start by allowing drilling in Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge. It can provide billions of barrels of recoverable oil and trillions of cubic feet of recoverable natural gas.

There are many outsiders that actively try to halt every natural resource development project in Alaska. Many of these same people have never even been to Alaska, yet they claim to know what's best for us.

Since 2006, we have surpassed Alaska, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and California in oil production to become the second largest oil-producing state in the nation, trailing only Texas. In 2012, North Dakota produced more than 245 million barrels of oil and provided nearly 11 percent of all U.S. output.

Colorado's collective shale deposits contain somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 trillion barrels of oil. That's almost as much as the entire world's proven oil reserves!

If you compare the size of our reserves of Saudi Arabia and the whole Middle East, it's like three times as much as all of that combined and that's just the easily, readily available 1800 billion barrels and there are probably 3 billion barrels that are commercially just under that, available.

The U.S. only has 20 billion barrels of oil in reserve. It seems as though there is no more oil around. Venezuela has 300 billion barrels of oil in reserves. Iraq has, like, 150 billion barrels of oil. Iran, close to 300 billion barrels of reserve. Oil for 200 years, of course.

We have been blessed in many respects with the explosion of the development of shale gas resources here in North America. It's both U.S. and in Canada.

We have for too long put vast oil and natural gas reserves off limits to exploration and production, as The Washington Post editorial stated this week.

I think we should drill up in Alaska.