High oil prices cause oil production in Missouri to start again (AP) (14-05-2008)

DEERFIELD, Mo. (AP) -- It has been twenty years since pump jacks were in operation in Missouri. This is the latest region to revive an industry that was considered costly by turning until now extraction methods into cash cows.

The domestic oil revival is taking place in smaller oil fields that require new technology, in a country where oil has been produced for the best part of three centuries, which means that a lot of the easy oil is gone. Now is under way the hunt for harder-to-get oil.

Heavy oil production in Missouri ended in the 1980s when oil prices went into a long decline.

Oil could not be sold for the money it costs to produce in places like Missouri; as sweet crude reached a record $126.98 a barrel Tuesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the time has come for smaller oil companies like MegaWest to return to abandoned reserves in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma.

Oil and gas well permitting in Pennsylvania is booming, as large exploration companies from as far away as Houston and Calgary expand the horizons of traditional drilling grounds there.

The U.S. uses an estimated 20 million barrels of oil a day. Stapleton from MegaWest said his Missouri fields will produce somewhere around 350 million barrels over a 20-year span or the rough equivalent of 35 days of current U.S. imports.

It may not be a universal solution to the problem, he says, but it helps to provide price stability and secure supply lines at home. "That 350 million barrels we produce, at $100 a barrel, is $35 billion that we don't send overseas," he said.

  Source AP