Are you having “Road Rage” when you pull up to the gas pump?

Welcome to the party,pal!

As I, being the good husband that I am, put gas in our car last night, I tried not to cry as I noticed the price here in the Mid-South: $3.39.9 per gallon! It seems like just the other day that the price was $2.78.9 per gallon.

What is even worse, is the fact that these increases in gasoline and other fuels could be around for months to come.

The national average is $3.43 per gallon, according to AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service.

The price of oil has gone up 21 percent since Feb. 15, when the Libyan revolution began. Libya controls the largest oil reserves in Africa. Even though America imports only a small amount of our oil from Libya, we’re still getting hammered at the pump.

We are now paying 29 cents more for a gallon of gas since the Libyan crisis started, an increase of about 10 percent. Americans are now having to spend an extra $108 million a day for gas.

Consumers will not only get slammed at the gas pump. Food merchants, airlines, shipping companies and other businesses will also pass along their higher costs to us.

According to retail consultant John Haber, online florists, pizza delivery companies, trash collectors, cruise lines and taxi drivers raised rates in 2008 as gasoline and diesel jumped above $4 per gallon. The rise in oil this year “is going to trigger the exact same type of behavior,” said Haber, a partner at NPI.  Diesel fuel, used by truckers, railroads and cruise ships, is up to $3.78 per gallon.

Already, the impact can be seen at the grocery store, where consumers buy lettuce, onions, strawberries, avocados, eggplant, and other produce shipped from Mexico and California, Haber said.

You know what the stupid thing is?  America has more than enough oil to supply our needs. 

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.

It was not until 2007, when EOG Resources of Texas started a frenzy when they drilled a single well in Parshal N.D. that is expected to yield 700,000 barrels of oil that real excitement and money started to flow in North Dakota. Marathon Oil is investing $1.5 billion and drilling 300 new wells in what is expected to be one of the greatest booms in Oil discovery since Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

The US imported about 14 million barrels of Oil per day in 2007 , which means US consumers sent about $340 Billion Dollars over seas building palaces in Dubai and propping up unfriendly regimes around the World, if 200 billion barrels of oil at $90 a barrel are recovered in the high plains the added wealth to the US economy would be $18 Trillion Dollars which would go a long way in stabilizing the US trade deficit and could cut the cost of oil in half in the long run.

Plus, there are new techniques available to get at hard-to-reach oil:

A new drilling technique is allowing oil companies to harvest vast fields of previously out-of-reach oil in the western United States. This, if allowed, will dramatically reverse a two-decade decline in domestic production of crude.

At present, oil companies are investing billions of dollars to tap oil deposits scattered across North Dakota, Colorado, Texas and California. All the experts say that by 2015, these new fields could yield as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day. That is more than the entire Gulf of Mexico produces now.

The new drilling technique is expected to raise U.S. production by at least 20 percent over the next five years. Within 10 years, it could help reduce oil imports by more than half.

Something America’s governmental experts and professional bureaucrats have failed to do…for whatever reason.

Engineers for the oil companies are applying a method developed in recent years to tap natural gas trapped in underground shale. They drill down and across into the rock, then pump water, sand and chemicals into the hole in order to crack the shale and allow gas to flow up.

Due to the scientific fact that oil molecules are sticky and larger than gas molecules, engineers thought the process wouldn’t work to squeeze oil out fast enough to make it economical.  However, drillers figured out that by increasing the number of cracks in the rock and using different chemicals, they could access the oil deposits at low cost.

Aubrey McClendon, chief executive of Chesapeake Energy, which is using the technique, is pretty excited:

We’ve completely transformed the natural gas industry, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we transform the oil business in the next few years, too.

If the Obama Administration-backed Environmentalist Wackos don’t purposefully stand in the way.