The new boom: Shale gas fueling an American industrial revival - The Washington Post

Eli,

The story below from the Washington Post lays out the positive impact fracturing and natural gas are having on the US economy. 

Environmentalists used to be in favor of gas, when they thought it would be expensive and hard to produce. Now that it it cheap and abundant they are opposed. For instance, see the comment in the story that natural gas is a u-turn to a dirty past. Also see the Sierra Club which used to support natural gas as a "bridge" fuel but now characterizes gas (and/or fracking) as "dirty, dangerous, and run-amok" 

There's probably somewhere over 100,000 wells that have been fractured over the past decade or so. Fracturing as a tool goes back well over 100 years. So we have lots and lots and lots and lots of evidence of the safety of this practice. After all, if it wasn't safe, wouldn't we have seen the impacts in geographies that have embraced fracturing, like Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado, Wyoming and North Dakota? 

We'll see what the EPA does. The fear some have is EPA will implement highly restrictive rules on fracturing that will increase costs for drillers and for natural gas. 

Bill

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-new-boom-shale-gas-fueling-an-american-industrial-revival/2012/11/14/73e5bb8e-fcf9-11e1-b153-218509a954e1_print.html

The new boom: Shale gas fueling an American industrial revival

By Steven Mufson, Published: November 14

The shale gas revolution is firing up an old-fashioned American industrial revival, breathing life into businesses such as petrochemicals and glass, steel and toys.

Consider the rising fortunes of Ascension Parish, La.

Methanex Corp., which closed its last U.S. chemical plant in 1999, is spending more than half a billion dollars to dismantle a methanol plant in Chile and move it to the parish.

Nearby, a petrochemical company, Williams, is spending $400 million to expand an ethylene plant. And on Nov. 1, CF Industries unveiled a $2.1 billion expansion of its nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing complex, aiming to displace imports that now make up half of U.S. nitrogen fertilizer sales.

These companies all rely heavily on natural gas. And across the country, companies like them are crediting the sudden abundance of cheap natural gas for revving up their U.S. operations. Thanks to new applications of drilling technology to unlock natural gas trapped in shale rock, the nation's output has surged and energy experts almost unanimously forecast that prices will remain low or moderate for a generation. The International Energy Agency says that by 2015, the United States will overtake Russia as the world's biggest gas producer.

"The supply of natural gas and the price are the driving factors, and we're swimming in natural gas down here," said Mike Eades, …….