OPINION:
You wouldn’t know it from all the hot air from the government, but American entrepreneurs, with little help from Washington, have ignited a worldwide energy revolution. They have done it despite of the efforts of the ideologues who prescribe an altogether different energy strategy.
The ideologues that President Obama brought with him to Washington six years ago arrived eager to implement the proposition that everything should be done to increase the cost of energy — the price at the pump and at the oil tank in the basement. Gasoline at $9 a gallon would make it possible to move on from evil fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — to enlightened dependence on the wind and the sun. The enlightened sources, so called, include highly subsidized grain in a world where millions of people don’t have enough to eat.
Amidst such guff and bluff, a group of American scientists with wrenches in hand have been working on a new technology. The new technology would open up vast reserves of the natural gas, and eventually oil, imprisoned in a “soft” rock that splits easily into flat pieces called shale. This is far below the table of drinking water, where no oil man had successfully gone before. Thus continues the shale revolution.
Natural gas, the least polluting of all the energy sources, emerged as the result in the discovery of enormous new reserves. The United States, almost overnight, became by far the largest producer of natural gas, and the best may be yet to come. New investments, with the jobs that follow, will require building liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities to enable export. More jobs, and high-paying jobs.
The technicians are creating what every politician for the three decades have only promised, energy independence for America. Other adventurers are working on “clean coal” — the United States is the coal baron of the world — that would compete with natural gas to produce electricity.
If Congress would put just a fraction of the subsidies now spent on primitive, inefficient “green energies” into building a national LNG distributing network, many of the nation’s 250 million cars and trucks would move with a cheaper, cleaner alternative to oil. Taxicabs in Japan and Hong Kong, for example, have been running on LNG and liquefied petroleum gas for half a century.
A unified international natural gas market, like the market for crude oil and petroleum products, is only now developing, and it’s developing rapidly. The continued fall in natural gas prices, undermined by growing American surpluses, are having an impact already on worldwide energy market.
The nation’s friendly adversaries in the Persian Gulf, led by the Saudis who put a considerable portion of their oil wealth into funding mosques to promote Islamic fanaticism at home and abroad, are trying to bluff the American oil mavericks. The big U.S. investments in shale recovery nevertheless continue to pay handsomely. There are indications that certain nations with enormous oil and gas deposits in the Middle East are failing in their attempt to underbid U.S. energy. The powerful Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries, led by the Saudis, are so far imposing no limits on production, as they did in earlier oil crises. This time they’re determined to protect their share of the market.
America’s shale men are not finished with their energy miracle, and are working on new techniques that beggar the imagination, of drilling deeper than ever, drilling on the slant, drilling sideways, with methods improved and perfected almost daily. American ingenuity and imagination continue to lead the world.
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