From Max Schulz’s article “The Quiet Energy Revolution” in today’s American.com:
By marrying and perfecting two processes into a technology called horizontal fracking, engineering has virtually created, from nothing, new natural gas resources, previously regarded as inaccessibly locked in useless shale deposits. Suddenly, the mammoth shale formations in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, North Dakota, and elsewhere have the potential to produce abundant amounts of gas for decades to come.
Human ingenuity has turned theoretical gas reserves—too costly ever to be exploited—into practical resources. And just in time. Less than a decade ago, experts were noting that conventional natural gas production had begun to plateau, despite annual increases in the number of wells drilled.
How ironic that during the ‘drill, baby, drill’ demonstrations as gasoline prices spiked in 2007 and 2008, a silent revolution with natural gas was already underway that will make those concerns largely irrelevant.
The chart below (data here) helps tell the story of America’s booming natural gas production. After a relatively flat period of natural gas production from 1994 to 2006 at about 25 trillion cubic feet per year, the advances in horizontal fracking have boosted domestic production by almost 1 trillion cubic feet on average in each of the last three years, bringing estimated production in 2009 to more than 29 trillion cubic feet. According to a recent Bloomberg report, the United States overtook Russia in 2009 as the world’s largest natural gas producer, largely due to the advances in drilling techniques that have reversed what was once thought to be an irreversible decline in domestic gas production.
Energy experts now estimate that there could be as much as 842 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in shales around the country, which is more energy than all of Saudi Arabia’s oil and represents a 90-year supply of gas at the current usage rate. Thanks to human ingenuity, technological innovation, and the advanced drilling techniques that Max Schulz highlights in his article, America’s energy future is suddenly looking much brighter.