Several great reads on energy. Lots of info. Since they are long, you might want to get a fresh cup of coffee and settle in for some good learnin’.

NBC News – Meet Harold Hamm, the billionaire behind America’s ‘great renaissance of oil’

Superb background on Harold Hamm and Continental Resources.  Mr. Hamm has a couple of fun quotes in the article. For example, some people say the oil industry is creating carbon pollution. He points out that all humans exhale carbon dioxide. Should we all quite breathing?
I think not.
How about enough oil for a hundred years? Check out this sentence:

This month Continental Resources told investors that the region contains enough recoverable oil to double the official count of U.S. reserves and enough “oil in place” to meet the nation’s needs for hundreds of years.

I get a kick out of the highly flexible, constantly changing definitions of “peak oil.” The article redefines peak oil as demand greater than supply. Since you could accuse me of making up such a silly definition, here is the author’s exact comment. A decade ago,

Experts warned of “peak oil,” an imminent time when demand for the world’s black oxygen would race ahead of supply.

The definition used for over 50 years (and still extremely visible in comments posted widely around the ‘net) is that at a calculable near-term date, we will use the last drop of oil in existence. Not demand higher than supply.

Great background on fracking.

MSN – Impact of US oil boom: Global reordering – Impact of US shale oil & gas is having global impact. Article says OPEC is actually acknowledging US oil could adversely affect their sales. Nigeria has seen exports to the US drop from 1.3 million bopd to 77k in the last 5 years. Russia will be impacted also.  Check out article for other guesses for possible impact, including potential of US drawing back from the Middle East as our dependence of oil from there drops off.

MSN – Texas tale: Another oil boom that is changing everything – A few key ideas. The US may soon become the largest oil producer in the world. As widely reported, the US produced more oil than imported in October. In other words, we now import less than 50% of the oil we use.