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Shale Oil Boom Takes Hold on the Plains

Shale oil is not to be confused with another potential resource, usually called "oil shale," which is found in huge volume in the Green River Formation of western Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

But the shale oil now being produced through fracking is conventional crude oil, produced using unconventional means.

Oil production in the U.S. portion of the Bakken went from 3,000 barrels a day in 2005 to about 400,000 now. The Bakken contains about 3.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil, making it the largest U.S.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/09/110928-shale-oil-boom-colorado-great-plains/

Geologists Sharply Cut Estimate of Shale Gas

The shale formation has about 84 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas, according to the report from the United States Geological Survey. This is drastically lower than the 410 trillion cubic feet that was published earlier this year by the federal Energy Information Administration.

The new federal numbers are also much lower than the roughly 350 trillion cubic feet estimated to be technically recoverable in the Atlantic region, home to the Marcellus Shale, by the Potential Gas Committee, a nonprofit group of industry experts and academics, in an April report.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/us/25gas.html