{"id":5581,"date":"2013-01-07T11:10:08","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T18:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unrbep.org\/?p=5581"},"modified":"2013-01-07T11:10:08","modified_gmt":"2013-01-07T18:10:08","slug":"energy-myths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/energy-myths\/","title":{"rendered":"Energy Myths"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: The Telegraph.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

By: Gwynne Dyer<\/p>\n

Which of the following statements is true? The United States of America now has a 100-year supply of natural gas, thanks to the miracle of shale gas. By 2017, it will once again be the world\u2019s biggest oil producer. By 2035, it will be entirely \u201cenergy-independent\u201d, and free in particular from its reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Unless you\u2019ve been dead for the past couple of years, you\u2019ve been hearing lots of enthusiastic forecasts like this, but not one of them is true. They are generally accompanied by sweeping predictions about geopolitics that are equally misleading, at least insofar as they depend on assumptions about cheap and plentiful supplies of shale gas and other forms of \u201cunconventional\u201d oil and gas.<\/p>\n

For example, we are assured that the US, no longer dependent on Arab oil, will break its habit of intervening militarily in the Middle East, since what happens there will no longer matter to Washington. But this new era of cheap and plentiful energy from fossil fuels will also result, alas, in sky-high greenhouse gas emissions and runaway global warming. These statements are also untrue, at least in the formulation given above, since they are based on quite mistaken assumptions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The original error, on which most of the others are based, is the belief that \u201cfracking\u201d \u2014 hydraulic fracturing of underground formations of shale rock to release the gas trapped within them \u2014 has fundamentally transformed the energy situation of the US. Huge amounts are being invested in the newer shale plays like the Eagle Ford formation in Texas and the Marcellus in Pennsylvania, but the numbers just don\u2019t add up.<\/p>\n

Production of shale gas has soared in the US in the past 10 years, but it is only compensating for the decline in conventional gas production in the same period. Moreover, while the operators\u2019 calculations assume a 40-year productive lifetime for the average shale gas well, the real number is turning out to be around five to seven years.<\/p>\n

Over the top<\/strong><\/p>\n

That means that in the older shale plays, they have to drill like crazy just to maintain current production \u2014 and since drilling is very expensive, they aren\u2019t making a profit. They are hoping to make a profit, of course, once the gas price recovers from the ridiculous level of $2 per million BTU that it fell to in 2009, when a great many people believed this really was a miracle. But it\u2019s clear that shale gas is no miracle that will provide ultra-cheap fossil fuel for the next 100 years. In that case, the prediction that the US will be the world\u2019s biggest oil producer by 2017 is nonsense. Even on an ultra-optimistic estimate of how much \u201cunconventional oil\u201d it can eventually get out of the shale formations, it will still be importing a large proportion of its oil in 2035.<\/p>\n

And the whole Middle Eastern business is a red herring, because the US does not depend heavily on Middle Eastern oil. Most US oil imports come from the Western hemisphere (Canada, Mexico, Venezuela) or from Africa (Nigeria, Algeria, Angola). Only 15 per cent of its oil comes from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait, and virtually none from anywhere else in the Gulf. Whatever America\u2019s various wars in the region may have been about, they were not about \u201csecurity of oil supply.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which leaves the business about shale gas and oil pushing the world\u2019s greenhouse gas emissions over the top. They can\u2019t do that, because we are already<\/em> over the top. We need only continue on our present course, without any growth in \u201cunconventional\u201d oil and gas production, and we will be irrevocably committed to 2 degrees Celsius of warming within 10 years.<\/p>\n

So why are we fed a daily diet of misinformation about energy in general, and shale gas in particular? Because a lot of people have something to sell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source: The Telegraph.com By: Gwynne Dyer Which of the following statements is true? The United States of America now has a 100-year supply of natural gas, thanks to the miracle of shale gas. By 2017, it will once again be the world\u2019s biggest oil producer. By 2035, it will be entirely \u201cenergy-independent\u201d, and free in … Continue reading Energy Myths<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5581"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5582,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5581\/revisions\/5582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}