Busting Obama's myth of scarce oil

President Obama often repeats his energy crisis talking points, claiming that even if we opened "every inch" of federal land for oil exploration, it wouldn't solve anything since U.S. has "only 2% of the world's oil reserves" but uses 20% of the world's oil.  That would be a fair point... if it were true.

Truth be told: The United States has LOTS more oil than Obama claims.

The U.S. has 22.3 billion barrels of proved reserves, a little less than 2% of the entire world's proved reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. But as the EIA explains, proved reserves "are a small subset of recoverable resources," because they only count oil that companies are currently drilling for in existing fields.

When you look at the whole picture, it turns out that there are vast supplies of oil in the U.S., according to various government reports.

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All told, the U.S. has access to 400 billion barrels of crude that could be recovered using existing drilling technologies, according to a 2006 Energy Department report.

When you include oil shale, the U.S. has 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable oil, according to the Institute for Energy Research, enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for about the next 200 years, without any imports.

As Eddie noted earlier today, the American public isn't buying the president's rhetoric.  According to the latest Fox News poll, just 26% of registered voters approve of Obama's job performance when it comes to battling high gas prices.

Related: On this day in history... gas prices have never been higher