Doug Sheridan: Imagine The Fix We'd Be In Without U.S. Shale
[Note: Doug Sheridan is a keen energy analyst and writer who posts commentaries on LinkedIn each day. I read him on a regular basis and, if you are on LinkedIn, you should read him, too. Enjoy.]
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the Telegraph, imagine what the world would look like today if US fracking technology and America’s drillers had not delivered the shale revolution. The West would have its back to the wall. All those books about the death of the West would be all too credible.
Instead, the US has been adding a new North Sea every three years. Feedstock from cheap domestic gas has driven a secular revival of the US chemical industry, which you can see in the petrochemical corridor stretching across the Gulf Coast from Galveston to New Orleans.
The Rust Belt from Pennsylvania to Ohio has returned to life as the Plastics Belt. The industry now exports $180bn (£137bn) a year. The shale effect has led to 351 projects since 2010, pulling in $250B of global investment in petrochemicals alone.
Kamala Harris called for a fracking ban in 2019 and regretted it. Three and a half years as VP have since given her a crash course in energy security and global geopolitics. Perhaps somebody whispered in her ear that without fracking America would have to fire up coal plants with twice the CO2 footprint… or told her that there are currently 283m cars on the road in the US and that 280m run off petroleum.
The revolution isn’t only in oil. Fifteen years ago, the US was on track to become the largest importer of LNG. It would not have been able to rescue Europe with “freedom molecules” after the invasion of Ukraine. It would have been competing desperately for scarce global supplies to keep its own economy afloat.
Instead, it has overtaken Qatar to become the largest exporter of LNG. This swing from net consumer to net supplier has added enough gas to world markets to more than neutralize the loss of Russian pipeline supply to Europe. “No one hates US LNG more than Vladimir Putin,” said Daniel Yergin.
The truth is had fracking never got off the ground, Putin’s energy blackmail would have succeeded. Europe would have faced dangerously depleted gas inventories, chronic blackouts, a winter freeze and the real prospect of an industrial death spiral.
America’s oil and gas industry have done the freedom-loving world a great favor. They changed the balance of global strategic and economic power to our benefit, and they have kept it going for long enough to close the window of opportunity for the China-Russia-Iran axis.
Our Take: Evans-Pritchard is no right-wing idealogue or oil and gas industry plant. Far from it. That he’s so in tune with the role that affordable and plentiful energy has played in geopolitics and economic growth over the last decade is testimony to the shift occurring in the energy-transition discussion. The good news is he’s right on point.
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That is all.
Very few people follow what brings the energy to the market. They would not care until everything stopped.
Most of the development of exploring shale in the US was led by private investment on non-government lands. Less than 15% of inside US oil and gas production is produced from Federal lands. Had the US been dependent upon government to lead we would never have developed, on a commercial scale, the technology of horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing to make exploring shale economic. Indeed it was private ownership of mineral rights and capitalism (read risk-based investment with profit motive) that made it possible. It literally changed the course of history.