This week’s special issue of Science magazine is focused on fracking…the technology which has changed the landscape of fossil fuel resources, particularly here in the United States. I would say that this technology has altered considerably more than the oil and gas story. In a sense it has become a key driver of geopolitical change with repercussions from the Levant to Asia.
Category: fracking
An optimistic view of America…
John Gapper in today’s FT, here.
Money quote:
The remarkable thing is how rapidly the US has managed to turn the technological tables in two of the most important global industries. For a few years, it looked lost in both telecommunications and energy, then it recovered and raced ahead. It hasn’t lost its touch.
Opposing reports on US Shale gas supplies
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 