Shale Gas Bubble Bursting: Report Debunks "100 Years" Claim for Domestic Unconventional Oil and Gas

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Food and Water Watch (FWW) released a report today titled “U.S. Energy Security: Why Fracking for Oil and Natural Gas Is a False Solution.” 

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. Far from it, in fact.

The report begs the disconcerting question: is the shale gas bubble on its way to bursting?

FWW crunched the numbers, estimating 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 (“fracking”) claim would make the U.S. the “next Saudi Arabia.” 

“The popular claim of a 100-year supply of natural gas is based on the oil and gas industry’s dream of unrestricted access to drill and frack, and it presumes that highly uncertain resource estimates prove accurate,” wrote FWW. “Further, the claim of a century’s 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 generate electricity.”

The race is on for the gas industry 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, 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 industry’s plans to export shale gas, America’s supposed ticket to energy security, reveal that the only thing the industry seeks to secure is its bottom line. But the oil and gas industry’s push to increase U.S. dependence on natural gas in the transportation and electricity sectors is perhaps even more insidious.

The unforunate reality is that peak domestic production may have passed, and over the coming years, production rates will likely decline. This means short-term, profit-oriented thinking will lead to contaminated air, polluted water, human health impacts, and even the industrialization of university campuses. Most importantly of all, it means a continued assault on the global climate, which makes for deadly and expensive extreme weather events. Think Hurricane Sandy.

All for a few decades of further fossil fuel addiction that doesn’t solve any of the problems that future generations will face.

 
FWW explained,
 
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.
 
It’s these numbers that have moved analysts to discover that the unconventional oil and gas craze is a potential economic crisis rather than a blessing, not to mention the accompanying climate and ecosystem costs and consequences of fracking the future
 
Image Credit: Shutterstockvisualdestination
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Steve Horn is the owner of the consultancy Horn Communications & Research Services, which provides public relations, content writing, and investigative research work products to a wide range of nonprofit and for-profit clients across the world. He is an investigative reporter on the climate beat for over a decade and former Research Fellow for DeSmog.

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