A comment I just left for moderation approval at Minnpost.com (I expect it to be approved but go down to comments on link.)

http://www.minnpost.com/bradallen/2011/03/01/26213/north_dakota_oil_fields_benefiting_from_mideast_unrest

Sites like the Bakken depend on a "floor" on oil prices of $40 to $50 per barrel.  To some extent the genie is out of the bottle with technologies like fracking and horizontal drilling.   (to turn and oil drilling pipe ninety degrees horizontal requires a turn of at least 600 feet.  Think of the quarter turn on a highway cloverleaf where you go from north to east.)

This technique requires special alloy drilling casings.  A typical Bakken well is one mile vertical and two miles horizontal, to use some comprehensible measures.  A well project costs five to seven million dollars.  The portion bearing oil and gas is only 100 to 150 feet thick.  In the past you would drill down, strike oil and gas but the well would "peter out" by the time you sobered up from the celebration.  Horizontal drilling solves this problem.

The viability of the Bakken and other "non-traditional" oil and gas sources depends on a sustained "floor" price oil in the $40 to $50 per barrel range.  This basically translates to $2 per gallon retail gasoline with current taxes.

As for the claims in the movie "Gasland" that the oil and natural gas seep up to water wells, this is a natural occurance.  In Bakken there is a requirement of putting gas detectors and water testing at wells near the or under the drilling.  Often these are detected before the drilling starts so you have have a "baseline". There is a thick layer of impermeable clay/shale above the oil bearing shale.  Basically the volcanic caldera under Yellowstone Park blew up at least twice showering more than six feet of volcanic ash in and around the Bakken area.

If you believe Wikileaks State department messages the Saudi oil reserves are 40% less than the optimistic claims.  If true, Saudi Arabia can no longer flood the market with cheap extraction oil like they did in the 1990's.   If true we will never see sustained gasoline under $2 per gallon and the Bakken will be "for real".  Williston, ND went bust when oil prices dropped dramatically in the 1990's.  Now it is again booming.

The Mideast turmoil "juiced" the Bakken stocks but the fundamentals are good so long as retail gasoline is more than two dollars a gallon.