It’s A Very Merry Christmas, Thanks to Fracking and It's Only Getting Better from Here!

Eight years ago I offered up the following Christmas message in a reflection on the Shale Revolution. It’s only gotten better since then with the LNG boom, of course, and many more blessings yet await.

As we celebrate Christmas and Hanukkuh, it’s a great time to reflect on the wonders wrought by the gifts we’ve been given include fracking technology.

Christmas and Hanukkah are a time for acknowledging gifts. I’m grateful for all those of of you who visit this blog regularly to learn about natural gas and such arcane subjects as fracking. It’s a great time, in that regard, to reflect on the gift of human ingenuity, the latest greatest example of which is hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

The easiest way to do that is for me to cite some of the awesome statistics connected with the shale revolution. These are facts made possible by fracking to stimulate shale oil and shale gas production and they’re simply incredible. Consider these from CNN Money:

• Fracking now accounts for more than half of all U.S. oil output, according to the Energy Information Administration. It made up less than 2% of American oil production in 2000.

• Back in 2000, there were just 23,000 fracking wells pumping about 102,000 barrels of oil a day. Now there are 300,000 fracking wells, churning out 4.3 million barrels per day.

• Fracking “has allowed the United States to increase its oil production faster than at any time in its history,” the EIA said in recent report.

• U.S. oil output has nearly doubled over the past decade and America only trails Saudi Arabia and Russia globally.

And, these from the The Motley Fool:

• According to estimates by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United Stares is sitting on 58 billion barrels and 665 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale oil and gas. To put those numbers into perspective, that’s enough oil to fuel 113 million consumer vehicles for nearly two decades and enough gas to heat 61 million homes for 160 years.

• Thanks almost entirely to shale drilling, U.S. oil production is expected to hit 11 million barrels per day by 2020, more than double the country’s output in 2005. So much oil is flowing that the U.S. may not need to import any crude at all, or at least only rely on friendly nations such as Mexico and Canada by the end of the decade.

• A vertical well in the Texas Spraberry/Wolfcamp shale would take between 30 to 35 years to produce 140,000 barrels of oil equivalent. However, a single horizontal well in the same area accomplished the same feat within its first six months of operation.

• According to a report by IHS CERA, shale drilling has boosted America’s average annual household income by $1,200. Based on the same study, unconventional energy production has also created 1.7 million direct and indirect jobs. Through 2020, shale drilling could generate more than two million jobs in the United States.

• All of this new found oil and gas could boost the value of the U.S. dollar and reduce the nation’s trade deficit. According to a study by IHS, shale drilling reduction could reduce the U.S. trade deficit by $164 billion by 2020. That statistic represents almost third of the nation’s current trade deficit.

• A reshoring trend is already underway in other industries like steel, fertilizers, and tires. According to a study by the Boston Consulting Group, the shift could bring back up to five million manufacturing jobs by 2020, positions once believed to be lost forever to China and other low cost countries.

Finally, here are still more from Gary Sernivtz’s The Green and The Black:

• If North Dakota, which produced 12.5% of US oil in 2014, were its own country, it would be the nineteenth largest oil producer in the world.

• In December 2014, the Marcellus Shale produced 16.7 million cubic feet per day of gas, some 21% of US production. It has supplied 2% five yeas earlier.

• The average well in the Marcellus in 2013 will extract four times the gas over its lifetime as the average well in the same play in 2009 and 17 times more than the average in 2007.

• The shale revolution cut by 53%—$221 billion less—America;s annual bill for importing oil, gas and petroleum products.

• From 2007 to 2012, thanks mostly to natural gas, US emissions of CO2 fell by a world-leading 725 million metric tons, equivalent to the total emissions of Germany.

This list could go forever with discussion of the hundreds of thousands of jobs created, the revitalization of rural America that has occurred, the billions of energy savings to urban gas and electricity consumers, our manufacturing renaissance and so on. You already get the point though, don’t you? There’s a lot to be thankful for this Christmas and Hanukkah; many gifts to celebrate thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, so…

Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkuh!

#NaturalGas #Fracking #ShaleRevolution #EnergySecurity

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