Originally Posted by bhutocracy

A couple of things:

1. It's expensive to produce so it'll never bring gas prices down that much.
2. It will be sold to the highest bidder, not neccecssarily America.
3. The resource is large but the aperture is small - production will be low and slow compared to a large conventional structure.
4. Even with the bakken America will still have to import oil.
5. It's being developed about as fast as possible (although the GFC slowed things down)
6. It could be more, it could be less, we're not talking proved reserves here.*

Basically, it's being developed pretty quickly and it will be a very important energy source but it isn't any kind of magic bullet and the higher the price of oil the faster it will be developed further embedding the economic stasis the price of gas will likely continue to be in.

*This isn't a big deal it's just that most people don't understand how prospective oil is measured. Until it's "proved" it's given a statistical chance of being there. There might be a lot more, there might be a lot less. I say this mainly as another poster thought companies could see the oil under the gound! You only ever get hints based on geological shapes and DHI's. The Bakken is a little different though being a shale (basically they tend to be HC bearing throughout it's extent), and the unproved numbers are now actually much higher than 3.5B.