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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!

China and the U.S. are the two largest importers of oil. They are the two largest emitters of carbon.

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.

Countries around the world are celebrating new oil and natural gas discoveries that hold the promise of greater prosperity for their citizens.

It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas.

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.

The other are the strategic, so-called strategic stocks that the United States and the other Western industrial countries have, which could put in as much as four million barrels a day of oil into the market pretty quickly.

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.

The idea that America, whose oil production has been declining for the past 40 years, is now on track to become the world's biggest producer by 2015 is still hard to grasp.

I'm a professional geologist, an explorationist for oil. That's what I've done in my career, one that's culminated in - at least to this point - playing a part in finding the largest field in the last 40 years anywhere in the world. That's the Bakken field, which I believe will yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come, maybe more.