The strategic benefits of fracking

James Robbins:

The United States is beginning to realize the strategic benefits of the fracking revolution. And they just keep growing.

This week at the IHS CERAWeek energy summit in Texas, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said that the United States anticipated "becoming big players" in the global liquefied natural gas market and that “there’s a good chance that we will be LNG exporters on the scale of Qatar,” which he noted was the world’s largest LNG exporter.

Technological leaps in fracking and more efficient drills have dramatically altered the energy landscape. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration illustrates how swiftly the revolution in LNG has come. In 2005, the U.S. imported a net 4 trillion cubic feet of LNG; by 2025 the U.S. will be a net exporter of that amount. Another report shows current U.S. monthly dry shale gas production at almost 40 billion cubic feet per day, up from about 2.5 billion cubic feet in 2000. One field, the Marcellus basin under West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York, is responsible for over a third of the increased output. Marcellus was producing only fractional amounts five years ago.

The surge in LNG production is part of a general good news story when it comes to energy. Overall American oil and natural gas production is soaring. In 2012, the U.S. surpassed Russia as the leading energy producer, measured by combined oil and gas energy production, and in 2014 U.S. oil production alone surpassed the energy output of Saudi Arabia’s oil and natural gas combined.

The United States, which until recently had been predicting a future of energy scarcity, now has to consider the emerging possibilities of energy as an element of national power. The energy surge is redrawing the world’s strategic landscape. The locus of global energy is shifting more rapidly out of the Middle East, which has the dual benefits of making that region and its myriad conflicts less important, and decreasing the flow of Western wealth into countries that convert it into destabilizing influences such as Islamic terrorism and Iran’s nuclear program.
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There is more.

This is similar to a theme seen here before.  The US presents a strategic threat to the domination of European energy by the Russians.   The US should expedite the approval of LNG export terminals to counteract Russian extortion.