Petroleum energy has become one of the major issues in this year’s presidential campaign.  It has been an issue for a long time, but it appears that the candidates are offering different solutions for the problem.  I’m not extremely happy with either one.  Seems like the Democrats want to offer us pennies (a compensation at the gas pumps), to ease the pressure of the cost of gas.  The Republicans want to run offshore and start drilling.  That not only sounds like a lot of extra cost, money coming from somewhere or somebody, it has a tendency to upset the greenies (conservationists, trees, air, sea, etc…).  The U.S.G.S. issued a report back in April of this year, I found out about this from a post on a forum I frequent, that stated that there is an oil supply in this country in a location called the “Bakken Formation” that contains 25 times more than it did in the 1995 estimate, according to the U.S.G.S.  This amount is somewhere between 3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Technically Recoverable Oil.  I have heard it said that this enough, with the rest of the oil deposits between Alaska’s north coast to the Gulf of Mexico to fulfill Americas’ petroleum needs for the next 20 to 30 years, and that the oil in this formation is of a quality good enough to reduce production costs enough that it could mean a drop in the price of oil from over $100 dollars a barrel to less than $20 dollars a barrel.  Now this could really ease the cost at the pumps.  Although the oil companies, I have heard said that the price of oil has no bearing on the cost of gas, I fail to see how the drop in the cost of oil that gas is made from of more than $80 dollars couldn’t affect the production cost of gas.  Now if you would like to verify this, please do.  Don’t take mine or anyone else’s word for it.  Check it out for yourself.  I wont even give you a link.  Just access any search engine and key in United States Geological Survey and let it lead you to their official site.  When you get there, click on the “Newsroom” tab and look for the report released on 4/10/2008 concerning the aforementioned formation and follow their links to get the whole story.  Happy reading, and don’t forget to pass the information on and bring it to the attention of certain political parties and let’s see if anyone can take a hint.  Maybe they will stop trying to cost us more money or give us baby pacifiers.  If all that I’ve read and heard is true, then someone in government is either choosing to ignore the report or they’re hoping the public doesn’t find out about it.  There are already wells pumping from this source.  It seems that it would be a lot cheaper to put a few more wells here in strategic locations than to go looking offshore. It would also go a lot further that a small kickback at the pumps.  It should also keep us running until someone could come up with a feasible alternative that would satisfy everyone’s requirements.