In today’s NY Times here.
Money quote:
In private discussions, some federal energy officials have raised questions about the way oil and gas companies may be inflating estimates of the amount of recoverable gas.
“The variability of shale gas well performance is crucial to any assessment of the resource potential of a shale play,” Philip Budzik, an Energy Information Administration research analyst, wrote in an e-mail to an industry analyst last April.
It’s larger than that actually. My guess it it’s the same competing political agendas that have complicated the Keystone Pipeline debate and the environmental safety of fracking technologies. That debate is playing out on many levels simultaneously and its outcome will no doubt be important to US Energy policy as it plays out (or doesn’t) over the next decade.
Discoverers and Discoveries 