Again, I quote the USGS --the energy folks have only drilled 10% of the potential wells in ND and MT as of May 2014.
Sure, they can drill more wells -- you can always drill holes in the ground -- but they aren't going to find great masses of oil.
Their estimate is that the Bakken will be a major energy player for 70 years with today's technology MINIMUM. Let's do the math: Current output is 1 million BBLS/day from the Bakken. The latest API estimate of recoverable oil and equivalent (natural gas inc) (again using today's technology) is 1.2 TRILLION BBLS of oil in the entire Bakken structure (not all is fully recoverable at this time, but much, much more so than just a few years ago).
Again, I strongly suspect this is a gross overestimate. Every single newly-fracked-field estimate for shale has been a gross overestimate for decades now. They follow a completely different dropoff pattern from conventional fields -- you get most of the oil and nearly all the gas upfront, and then they drop off *sharply*.
Some of the USGS internal reports seem to have adjusted for that; but has this report done so? Because the oil companies really hated it when the first honest report came out (pointing out that there was next-to-nothing in the Utica and Marcellus Shale), and I wouldn't be surprised if the USGS backed off and stopped giving honest reports, since there's a lot of regulatory capture these days.
That line about "equivalents" is particularly suspicious, and has proven wrong repeatedly: the fracked natural gas fields always run low in 10 years. The liquids last somewhat longer usually.
70 years is a complete fantasy. The gushers in Wyoming lasted 70 years; that was conventional oil. There is no way in hell that a fracked shale field, which has a far sharper dropoff curve, will last that long.
...of course, as lspolkom points out, the pricing might get them first. There are some *really* big trends happening in energy. The electricity market is about to cross the threshold where solar power is cheaper than anything else, including natural gas, coal, and oil; it already has crossed the threshold in several states and countries. The heating market will cross the threshold where it is cheaper to heat with electricity than gas soon after that (it's already cheaper than heating with oil), definitely within the next 10 years. Due to battery pricing dropping at a somewhat slower rate than solar pricing, the transportation market will take slightly longer to cross the threshold where electric autos are more cost-effective than gasoline autos, but it's going to be crossed fairly soon nonetheless -- my guess is within 20 years. At that point it's over; the other uses for oil are niche, in volume terms, and can be satisfied by old Saudi fields.
The economics: Renewable energy prices -- still falling -- will put a cap on retail prices for fossil fuels, though there will be several bounces in price (for both) due to supply constraints on solar panels. The oil prices will continue to cycle between high (supply-constrained, destroys demand permanently as people switch) and low (demand-constrained, causes cancellation of investment in exploration and new wells). This won't destroy the oil business entirely -- after all, Saudi Arabia's still got a lot of "easy" oil which doesn't require new wells at all -- but it will destroy the exploration business.
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