Food and Water Watchย (FWW) released a report today titled โU.S. Energy Security: Why Fracking for Oil and Natural Gas Is a False Solution.โย
It shows, contrary to industry claims, there aren’t 100 years of unconventional oil and gas sitting below our feet, even if President Barack Obama said so in his 2012 State of the Union Address.ย Far from it, inย fact.
The report begs the disconcerting question: is the shale gas bubble on its way toย bursting?
FWW crunched the numbers, estimatingย that there are, at most, half of the industry line, some 50 years of natural gas and much less of shale gas. This assumes the industry will be allowed to perform fracking in every desired crevice of the country. These are the same basins that advocates of hydraulic fracturing (โfrackingโ) claim would make the U.S. the โnext Saudi Arabia.โย
โThe popular claim of a 100-year supply of natural gas is based on the oil and gas industryโs dream of unrestricted access to drill and frack, and it presumes that highly uncertain resource estimates prove accurate,โ wrote FWW.ย โFurther, the claim of a centuryโs worth of natural gas ignores plans to export large amounts of it overseas and plans for more domestic use of natural gas to fuel transportation and generateย electricity.โ
The race is on for the gas industryย to export unconventional gas on the global market, implement a gas-powered utilities sector, and create a gas-powered vehicle market. Due to these races,ย FWW says that the resource is being depleted at a rate far more quickly than the industry would like to admit to the mass public, writing,
The oil and gas industryโs plans to export shale gas, Americaโs supposed ticket to energy security, reveal that the only thing the industry seeks to secure is its bottom line. But the oil and gas industryโs push to increase U.S. dependence on natural gas in the transportation and electricity sectors is perhaps even moreย insidious.
All for a few decades of further fossil fuel addiction that doesn’t solve any of the problems that future generations will face.
The United States consumed about 18.8 million barrels of oil per day in 2011, yet it produced only an estimated 0.55 million barrels of tight oil per day. The EIA does project that tight oil production will increase, but to only about 1.2 million barrels per day between now and 2020, peaking at 1.33 million barrels per day in 2029 before starting to decline. This peak would amount to only about 7 percent of the 18.8 million barrels per day consumed in the United States in 2011.ย
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