Exxon's Black Sunday

Whatever you do, never mistake oil shale for shale oil.

Confusing the 2.6 trillion barrels of oil shale reserves in the Western United States with the billions of barrels of recoverable shale oil in formations like the Bakken and Eagle Ford is the single most expensive blunder you can make in the energy sector.

Just ask ExxonMobil...

Interchanging the words "shale" and "oil" is a lesson the energy giant learned the hard way.

Back in 1980, Exxon dished out $300 million for a stake in the Colony shale oil project in Colorado. A year later, the company broke ground on the project's commercial scale shale oil plant. The plan was to ramp up oil shale production to 46,000 barrels of oil shale per day.

However, things didn't exactly work out well for them.

The entire project was scrapped on May 2, 1982, and infamously dubbed "Black Sunday" from there on out.

In total, this disastrous project cost Exxon more than $1 billion — and resulted in the company handing out 2,200 pink slips.

Throughout this entire debacle, there was another event taking place nearly 1,000 miles away...

About the same time that Exxon was building its doomed oil shale plant, a man named George Mitchell was drilling his first horizontal wells into the Barnett Shale in Texas.

It was Mitchell's pioneer work with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that led to the U.S. reversing its multi-decade production decline.

Now that ExxonMobil is the only big name left in oil shale, you can't help but wonder how it's fared against the big shale oil plays in the today's market.

Pitting it against a North Dakota oil company trading with a market cap 125 times less than Exxon, one would think one of the world's largest publicly traded oil companies would come out on top over the last five years...

As you can see, that's clearly not the case.

What's more, the winner on this chart is just one of the three best Bakken stocks available to retail investors.

I realize you don't need me to tell you the kind of win-win situation these North Dakota drillers are in right now... 

Check the details out for yourself right here.