Is North Dakota Awash in Oil?

My buddies at KHND radio in Harvey, ND forwarded a post from Rob Port at Say Anything Blog (from North Dakota and another regular guest as I am on KHND) that indicates that America's oil problem could be solved by a potentially huge oil field under North Dakota and neighboring states:

America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.

In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel.

If this turns out to be true, this could be great news. However, let's not forget that we have Democrats that won't even let us drill in the frozen tundra of Alaska. What are the odds they'll let us drill anywhere in the lower 48?