Your two geologists seem to be outliers. Berman says high oil prices caused the recent recession. But those high prices were a spike that quickly dropped. The nearly singular cause was the collapse of US financial institutions leading to a world crisis and the evaporation of trillions in highly leveraged assets. Our recent, pre-glut oil price highs didn't affect the recovery to a noticeable extent. The current glut was engineered by the Saudis, to prevent the Iranian recovery and the reopening of the Shia-controlled Iraqi oil fields. This glut is the sole reason for the deliberate reductions in tight oil production in the US.

The USGS has called the Bakken play "the largest continuous petroleum accumulation it has ever assessed," with at least 5 billion barrels potential production. The Bakken is a single cyclothem (stratum) of shale and is underlain by the Three Forks formation, which has proven reserves, and which is underlain by at least three more geologically similar formations.