The Heritage Foundation - Leadership for America

We’ve documented before how countries around the world are setting a break neck pace developing their own natural resources, while the United States, crippled by the environmental left, is failing to add energy production. Just this weekend, Jordan announced it was in talks with Royal Dutch Shell on an agreement to extract oil from the desert kingdom’s 40 billion ton oil shale reserves. Jordan’s Natural Resources Authority head Maher Hjazin told AFP, “If our plans succeed, it would be one of the country’s largest projects to help the Jordan become energy self-sufficient, with a possibility to export oil in the future.”

As impressive as Jordan’s oil shale deposit sounds, the U.S. has the world’s largest oil shale deposits. A recent RAND Corp. study estimates that there are 1.5 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels worth of oil shale in Green River Formation, which goes through Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. That is three times the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.

The rest of the world is beginning to notice we say one thing and do another when it comes to developing resources. The American’s Robert Bryce reports:

At last month’s World Petroleum Congress in Madrid, the blatant hypocrisy of U.S. energy policy—demanding that OPEC members expand their oil drilling efforts while restricting offshore drilling here at home—was a prominent topic of discussion. Indeed, the U.S. ban on drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf was mentioned by three of the most powerful people in the global energy business: the head of OPEC; the chief executive of Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras; and the Saudi oil minister. All of them said the United States should start drilling in its offshore areas.

During a press conference in Madrid, Chakib Khelil, the Algerian oil minister and president of OPEC, was asked what the United States could do to lower oil prices. He mentioned three things: stabilize the value of the dollar, increase energy efficiency, and “open up your exploration. In Algeria, we have a bidding round going on. We are open. The U.S. also needs to open…offshore Florida, offshore Alaska, need to be opened to exploration.”