A local oil/gas producer has shed some light. At this point I would prefer to leave his name off the page, as he is a customer as well. He claims there is approx 8 Billion bbls they are aware of, that could be accessed from under our lakes with slant drilling. That does not include the additional LNG they are looking at as well. Getting to it however, is more difficult than merely having the appropriate equipment, but requires consensus of the states in the great lakes basin. One legislator in Wisconsin is attempting to push forward drilling.
Mackinac Center Russ Harding joined Hugh McDiarmid on “The Frank Beckmann Show”for a discussion of directional drilling and what we might gain from it. The SFE blog points out rightly that a main concern that is now put forward “Aesthetic pollution” is NOT a significant enough primary reason to put the brakes on drilling. “We are at the end of the pipeline” Russ explained, and as oil must travel great distances to get to Michigan, Russ’s point of lowering the risk of environmental hazard exposure by harvesting oil locally should be taken into consideration.
Overriding fears of “leakage” from drilling operations is one we need to take seriously. However, though the processes do need to be vetted, technological advances in the petroleum industry have provided us with safe oil drilling practices as shown by platforms which successfully withstood hurricanes, and other potential disasters. Michigan could gain a bit from adding TO the oil supply, and becoming part of the solution to our national security and providing more oil, which has become vital to quite literally EVERYTHING we do.