D riving through Sistersville, W.Va., a little town alongside the Ohio River, you would never know that 110 years ago it was the center of an oil boom. But in the first decade of the 20th century, if you were in the oil business, it was the place to be.

My great-grandfather, a farmer a little like Jed Clampett, managed to be in the right place at the right time.

His land wasn’t worth much, at least not for farming, but it sat in the middle of a surprisingly rich oil field. He went on to make a fortune.

However, the boom, like all booms, eventually fizzled. The wells, using the technology of the time, became less economical and within a few years were shut down.

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My great-grandfather lost all his money in the 1929 stock market crash.

However, even facing economic ruin, he held on to the mineral rights to his old farm in Tyler County. He seemed to know something everyone else didn’t.

For 50 years thereafter, the consensus in the family was that paying the taxes on this property was a complete waste of money. However, in the 1970s, an oil company leased the property, and we made a little money. However, it never drilled on. That was 28 years ago.

Today, with the massive increase in energy prices, the property is once again interesting, and probably this time someone is going to start drilling. But there is more to this story than just the mineral rights to an abandoned farm. 

As the price of a barrel of crude oil, even in spite of some retreat, continues to hold at record levels, the notion of exploiting America’s domestic reserves is becoming more attractive.

Most Americans are so used to foreign oil that they have no idea just how much oil is still under the continental United States.

The estimates vary, depending on how it’s counted, but the general consensus is that the U.S. still sits on about 15 billion barrels of oil.

It could be much larger if it were to include offshore oil along the Atlantic seaboard, restricted by congressional mandate, new finds in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaskan oil, and oil that could be under millions of acres of western lands owned by the Bureau of Land Management.

Every day, America consumes roughly 21 million barrels of oil, but only 5 million of that total is produced domestically. The rest is imported.

Foreign oil, because of its recovery costs, even after a 10,000-mile journey, has historically been cheaper.

However, if current prices continue, this dynamic is going to change.  

This means that oil fields, many abandoned for so long that most Americans don’t know that they were once centers of oil production, are getting a second look. In 2007, the West Virginia Office of Oil and Gas issued a record 3,200 oil drilling permits.

Other states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, California and Wyoming, as well as older Texas oil fields, long since capped, have all seen a boom in requests for new drilling permits.

In some cases, getting more oil out of an old field is as simple as drilling a little deeper. Wells, like those that made my great-grandfather rich, went down just a few hundred feet. Today, oil drillers can go thousands of feet.

Also, there are a host of technologies that can force oil to the surface. They’re expensive, and when oil was $63 a barrel, as it was last year, this kind of intense recovery effort wasn’t worth the expense.

While reaching into these new sources won’t necessarily solve our energy problem, it will give us some breathing room.

The only thing government has to do at this point, and this is handy because Congress clearly can’t agree on a national energy policy, is simply get out of the way.