The oil shale boom
Image via WikipediaUntil last year, the 17-mile stretch of road between this forsaken South Texas village and the county seat of Carrizo Springs was a patchwork of derelict gasoline stations and rusting warehouses.There is more.
Now the region is in the hottest new oil play in the country, with giant oil terminals and sprawling RV parks replacing fields of mesquite. More than a dozen companies plan to drill up to 3,000 wells around here in the next 12 months.
The Texas field, known as the Eagle Ford, is just one of about 20 new onshore oil fields that advocates say could collectively increase the nation’s oil output by 25 percent within a decade — without the dangers of drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the delicate coastal areas off Alaska.
There is only one catch: the oil from the Eagle Ford and similar fields of tightly packed rock can be extracted only by using hydraulic fracturing, a method that uses a high-pressure mix of water, sand and hazardous chemicals to blast through the rocks to release the oil inside.
The technique, also called fracking, has been widely used in the last decade to unlock vast new fields of natural gas, but drillers only recently figured out how to release large quantities of oil, which flows less easily through rock than gas. As evidence mounts that fracking poses risks to water supplies, the federal government and regulators in various states are considering tighter regulations on it.
The oil industry says any environmental concerns are far outweighed by the economic benefits of pumping previously inaccessible oil from fields that could collectively hold two or three times as much oil as Prudhoe Bay, the Alaskan field that was the last great onshore discovery. The companies estimate that the boom will create more than two million new jobs, directly or indirectly, and bring tens of billions of dollars to the states where the fields are located, which include traditional oil sites like Texas and Oklahoma, industrial stalwarts like Ohio and Michigan and even farm states like Kansas.
“It’s the one thing we have seen in our adult lives that could take us away from imported oil,” said Aubrey McClendon, chief executive of Chesapeake Energy, one of the most aggressive drillers. “What if we have found three of the world’s biggest oil fields in the last three years right here in the U.S.? How transformative could that be for the U.S. economy?”
The oil rush is already transforming this impoverished area of Texas near the Mexican border, doubling real estate values in the last year and filling restaurants and hotels.
“That’s oil money,” said Bert Bell, a truck company manager, pointing to the new pickup truck he bought for his wife after making $525,000 leasing mineral rights around his family’s mobile home. “Oil money just makes life easier.”
Based on the industry’s plans, shale and other “tight rock” fields that now produce about half a million barrels of oil a day will produce up to three million barrels daily by 2020, according to IHS CERA, an energy research firm. Oil companies are investing an estimated $25 billion this year to drill 5,000 new oil wells in tight rock fields, according to Raoul LeBlanc, a senior director at PFC Energy, a consulting firm.
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I have been blogging about the Eagle Ford formation for years now, and it is finally getting some national attention. It has the potential to not only improve our domestic production, but lead to similar fields elsewhere in the country.
The fracking phobic left is desperate for an excuse to stop any carbon based energy production in the US and they have been trying to frighten the government into shutting it down. But, even the EPA says there is little to worry about.
While I am all for development of areas like the Eagle Ford, we should still be developing offshore ares on both the Atlantic and Pacific Coast as well as the Eastern Gulf. The jobs created and the revenues generated through royalties to the government could kick our economy into overdrive and start to erase the enormous debt that Obama and the Democrats have run up. They could also help to address the entitlement problems.
It is really shortsighted and foolish for the anti energy left to oppose this development. We are going to be using the same amount of oil and gas, and it just makes sense to be using ours. I also support conversion of vehicles to the use of natural gas which we also have in abundance. There is a much better energy future out there if the left will just get out of the way. They can still push their alternative energy dreams while we pay for them with American oil and gas instead of building fabulous cities around the Arabian Gulf and subsidizing our enemies in places like Pakistan.
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